By Jeffrey Scott

Healthcare reform
is getting a mind-bending boost from the American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act, with as much as $46 billion being directed toward
Health Information Technology. Managing this effort is the Office of
the National Coordinator for HIT, Dept. of Health and Human Services,
or ‘ONC’ for short. The ONC is spoken of in hushed tones, befitting an
organization with such enormous impact, so I was especially interested
to hear its Director, Dr. David Blumenthal, speak at the recent HIT
Symposium at MIT (June 30 – July 2).

TCS Healthcare Technologies (TCS)
announced today that they have added an interactive text messaging
application and interface to its care management software platform,
supported by Life: WIRE™ Corp, a mobile communications and health
information solution provider.

MEDRAD, Inc. has launched Manage.Report, an
informatics application that enables healthcare professionals to
immediately access clinical and administrative information associated
with radiology patients’ contrast injections from nearly anywhere.

Amidst the swine flu outbreak and the occurrence
of 1.7 million infections among patients every year, Coastal
HealthTrain adds one more hand hygiene program, Hand Hygiene: The Best
Medicine, to an already comprehensive collection on the subject.

As the outbreak of swine flu made headline news
this year, so did concerns about infection control. Preventing the
spread of this illness and others among hospital staff and patients is
critical, and the world is now paying close attention.

Baxa Corporation, announces the release of
upgrades to its IntelliFlowRx workflow management system. IntelliFlowRx
is designed to improve safety and accuracy in pharmacy-based IV
admixture preparation.

With barcode-based error-proofing system
solutions from General Data Company, Inc. www.general-data.com, Henry Ford
Hospital in Detroit has made its Pathology laboratory workflow more
efficient and reduced the number of intralab identification errors by
85 percent.

Using McKesson’s Horizon Study Share™ reference
case solution, the American College of Radiology (ACR) has made its
entire library of ACR Learning File® images and content available
online as a Web-hosted archive to ACR members and others in the field.

Initiate Systems, Inc., a leader in data
management solutions for the exchange of health information, announced
today a new partnership with Axolotl Corp., a premier provider of
Health Information Exchange (HIE) solutions and services. Following
successful product integration in Axolotl’s engineering labs, the two
healthcare technology industry leaders will deliver solutions that
enable interoperability between healthcare information systems in
hospitals, Integrated Delivery Networks (IDNs), Regional Healthcare
Information Organizations (RHIOs) and statewide healthcare exchanges.

The American Medical Association (AMA) announced
today it is working with Microsoft to better connect patients with
their physicians. Patients and their physicians will be able to
exchange vital health care information by connecting through
Microsoft’s HealthVault, a
platform developed by Microsoft to store and maintain health and
fitness information.