Although black patients with MI have worse outcomes than white patients, the differences did not persist after adjustment for patient factors and site of care, according to a cohort study in the March 3 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.

When President Barack Obama signed the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law, designating approximately $18 billion for the state Medicare programs and $2 billion for healthcare IT investments, providers were left "scratching their heads" about how the funds could potentially impact their bottom line, according to Bradley Erickson, MD, PhD, from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

Scientists have developed a risk score that could help to identify people at risk of atrial fibrillation in the primary-care setting, and may also aid the targeting of prevention measures at high-risk individuals, according to study in the Feb. 28 issue of the Lancet.

Cleveland Clinic, one of the nations leading healthcare facility, has upped the ante once again with the debut late last year of a new cardiac care facility equipped with state-of-the-art imaging with sophisticated diagnostic and treatment technology that is smoothly integrated with enterprise-wide clinical IT systems.

With e-health initiatives across the United States in various stages of development, states now have an opportunity to determine the best regulatory and governance framework to support and advance electronic healthcare IT and health information exchange (HIE), according to a report prepared for the State Alliance for e-Health by the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Eighty-five percent of hospitals in the contracting phase of an IT acquisition have signed with a Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT)-certified vendor according to data from the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Analytics Database.

An examination of clinical practice guidelines issued by the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association for treating cardiovascular (CV) disease has revealed that current recommendations are largely based on lower levels of evidence or expert opinion, according to a study this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT) has updated a roadmap for expansion of its healthcare IT certification activities, including its health information exchange (HIE) efforts.