GE Healthcare announced today that version 11 of its EMR and practice management solution – Centricity Practice Solution – has received Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) pre-validation status from the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA).  With this pre-validation, customers using Centricity Practice Solution 11 can now eliminate some of the documentation required to qualify for PCMH recognition.In response to regulatory change, the healthcare industry is rapidly shifting to new care and payment models. The PCMH model is designed to improve primary care, with a focus on total care coordination through measurement, transparency, and accountability. Practices that have been recognized as Patient Centered Medical Homes by NCQA have often received enhanced reimbursement, increased patient satisfaction, reduced hospitalization rates, and reduced readmission rates.

Merge Healthcare Incorporated (Nasdaq:MRGE), a leading provider of clinical systems and innovations that seek to transform healthcare, today announced that Imaging Specialists of Charleston and Charleston Radiologists, P.A. has selected Merge Healthcare's entire Merge Outpatient Radiology Suite as well as Merge Honeycomb(TM) Archive."Because our organization is committed to providing the highest level of patient care and the latest technology available in our field, we've recently made the decision to align ourselves with a partner who can help to enable our ambitious plans for growth with leading technology," explained Michael Garovich, MD, President of Charleston Radiologists.

Net Health, the leader in software solutions for outpatient specialty care, has announced the availability of The Outpatient Wound Clinic Market Performance Report, developed using data from more than 700,000 patients and more than 1.5 million individual wounds documented in the WoundExpert® software, Net Health's Electronic Medical Record (EMR) for wound management.Based on a review of wound data from 2010 through 2012, the report provides findings about wound clinic performance and clinical outcomes from the provider of the largest EMR solution in the industry.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Inland Northwest Health Services is improving patient care via their cloud-based electronic health record services delivered to physicians and medical facilities with IBM server and storage technology.(Logo:  http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20090416/IBMLOGO)The solution based on IBM System x servers, Storwize and DS8000 Storage systems, SAN Volume Controller storage virtualization technology and storage software, ensures high reliability, availability and efficiency for the EHR services INHS provides to 40 hospitals and 750 physicians in the northwest United States.

ITelagen, Inc., a leading provider of healthcare IT support announced the immediate availability of NextGenAnywhere™, a technology that delivers the NextGen® Ambulatory EHR to mobile devices. Now available for iPad and Android tablet mobile devices, NextGenAnywhere is powered by ITelagen's innovative EHRAnywhere™ platform to enable physicians the freedom and flexibility to access patient medical data and applications – where and when they are needed. NextGen Healthcare Information Systems, LLC, is a leading provider of healthcare information systems and connectivity solutions and a wholly owned subsidiary of Quality Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: QSII).As a NextGen® Certified Partner and VAR (Value Added Reseller), ITelagen is offering the NextGenAnywhere technology to provide physicians and staff with on-demand access to the application, enabling maximum productivity and mobility with their EHR.

Stephen J. Ubl, president and CEO of the Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed), issued the following statement after the introduction in the U.S. Senate of bipartisan legislation (S.1413) exempting FDA user fees from cuts under sequestration.

Carestream announced at AHRA 2013 that its zero-footprint Vue Motion image viewer is being deployed by dozens of healthcare providers across the nation. Many facilities have added the versatile image viewer to their EMR/Citrix environments to speed delivery of images and reports to clinicians and referring physicians.

In the rush to leverage IT and master EHRs, physicians may be overlooking the basics of patient care, Meryl Bloomrosen, MBA, American Medical Informatics Association vice president for policy, contends in a blog post.