Molly Merrill

David Blumenthal, MD, the newly appointed National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, sees "major hurdles" for the HITECH Act, according to a New England Journal of Medicine article.

Twelve nonprofit healthcare organizations across Colorado will receive $2 million in grants to help them adopt health information technology.

According to a recent survey, the healthcare industry is at least 15 percent behind other industries when it comes to automation.

Michael J. Kussman MD, the Under Secretary for Health for the Department of Veterans Affairs plans to retire from federal service.

Microsoft Health Users Group (Microsoft HUG) and Microsoft Corp. have announced the winners of the 12th annual Microsoft HUG 2009 Innovation Awards, which recognizes organizations, vendors and systems integrators that demonstrate advancements and success using Microsoft technology in the healthcare industry.

Surescripts has named Harry Totonis, as president and chief executive officer, effective immediately.

The National All Schedules Prescription Electronic Reporting (NASPER) bill, designed to coordinate a prescription monitoring program in all 50 states, has received preliminary funding to begin implementation.

Biomedical informatics researchers at the Mayo Clinic and IBM have launched a Web site for the newly founded Open Health Natural Language Processing (NLP) Consortium, which will facilitate an open-source space to promote past and current development efforts, including participation in information extraction from electronic medical records.

Pamela J. Pure, executive vice president of McKesson and president of McKesson Technology Solutions, left the company on Monday, officials said.

Researchers have successfully created a computer simulated system for evaluating an investigational artificial pancreas.