To identify solutions of nursing care that will
not only address many of the issues facing the profession but also
transform the way Americans receive health care, the IOM and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have
launched a new Initiative on the Future of Nursing.

Hospital discharge is a time during which
patients and families are at their most vulnerable. There is so much
information they need to know, just when they may be least able to
absorb, remember and act on it.

A new report from the Institute of Medicine recommends 100 health topics
that should get priority attention and funding from a new national
research effort to identify which health care services work best. It
also spells out actions and resources needed to ensure that this
comparative effectiveness research initiative will be a sustained
effort with a continuous process for updating priorities as needed and
that the results are put into clinical practice.

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.