Aetna is providing physicians with electronic services about patients' health care, such as alerts warning physicians about potential drug-to-drug or drug-to-disease interactions that potentially can help save lives. These Care Considerations will now be sent through Aetna's secure provider website via NaviNet, the multi-sponsor health care communication platform from NaviMedix. Last year, more than 1.6 million Care Considerations were sent by phone, fax or mail to physicians who provided care for Aetna members.

Care Management International has announced the commercialization of its Rx Switch Program. The Rx Switch Program is designed to provide health care members with information and education about the cost of their prescriptions. Trained staff contacts members by phone to educate them about clinically appropriate, less expensive medicines. Members have the option of speaking to a pharmacist to answer their questions about drug safety and efficacy. Current interventions such as educational mailings or redeemable co-pay waivers, which have shown modest progress, do not engage members directly. Using a smart-sourced approach, Care Management International also captures valuable feedback so that health plans can better understand members’ barriers to switching.

Agfa HealthCare has introduced its IMPAX Enterprise Productivity Suite (EPS), a new offering that helps increase radiologists' productivity by managing diagnostic reading and reporting across distributed PACS environments. Agfa HealthCare's IMPAX Enterprise Productivity Suite (EPS) is designed to help improve the radiologists' overall efficiency by creating an Enterprise Worklist for coordinating reporting activity across distributed sites over a wide area network (WAN).

InterSystems Corporation has announced that the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) has implemented the second-generation DictAide medical transcription platform from AssistMed. AssistMed's solution addresses MUSC's need to reduce costs tied to medical transcription while improving quality and staff productivity. An InterSystems application partner, AssistMed interfaces DictAide with third-party systems using InterSystems Ensemble, the rapid integration platform

Vanderbilt University Medical Center of Nashville, TN has chosen the My Patient Passport Express kiosk for its patient check-in program. The My Patient Passport Express kiosk from D2 Sales allows patients to check-in, make future appointments, and update their medical history, all using a simple to navigate touchscreen kiosk with HIPPA compliant custom privacy overlay. Patients can use their credit card to make co-pay payments, and sign documents using the integrated electronic signature pad. In addition to the easy to use monitor on the kiosk.

Misys Healthcare Systems will enhance Misys MyWay, its physician-friendly electronic medical record (EMR), for targeted use within specialty medical practices through a contract with Wolters Kluwer Health, a leading provider of information for professionals and students in medicine, nursing, allied health, pharmacy and the pharmaceutical industry. While enhancing the quality and depth of the clinical content of Misys MyWay, this agreement will enable a wide range of specialty physicians to use the software “out of the box” with virtually no specialty-specific customization required, thus decreasing implementation time. Initially, the agreement will provide Misys MyWay with Wolters Kluwer enhanced content for primary care and cardiology. Misys expects the first MyWay offering with Wolters Kluwer enhanced clinical content to be available in July.

Misys also announced a multi-million dollar contract with Daughters of Charity Health System (DCHS), to expand its health network across California through the use of Misys MyWay for Communities. Over the next three months, DCHS will present Misys MyWay to San Jose, Los Angeles and Bay Area physician practices at a subsidized rate to encourage increased adoption. Daughters of Charity Health System will offer Misys MyWay for Communities as a hosted solution offering wide-ranging capabilities for electronic medical records (EMRs), practice management and claims management.

Daughters of Charity Health System (DCHS) has selected Surgical Information Systems (SIS) to be the perioperative system provider for four of its California hospitals. Seton Medical Center, O’Connor Hospital, and Saint Louise Regional Hospital will be implementing the SIS Comprehensive Solution, and St. Vincent Medical Center, a SIS partner since 2003, will add significant upgrades to its current system. SIS was chosen because of its proven ability to improve quality, reduce cost, and increase revenue recognition by controlling lost charges, ensuring accurate scheduling processes, and by offering immediate data analysis for decision support initiatives. SIS Anesthesia, the only anesthesia system available that shares a single database with its perioperative system, will be implemented at all four facilities—along with SIS Analytics and the HFMA Peer Reviewed Rules-Based Charging.

MEDHOST, provider of the leading Emergency Department Information System (EDIS), will implement the Boston Software Systems WorkStation technology in situations where customers are unable to support or withstand HL7 standards. Boston WorkStation will support MEDHOST by enabling dictionary synchronization and advanced clinical content integration in these particular customer sites to ensure the free flow of critical patient information into the hospital information system (HIS).

GetWellNetwork has announced the availability of the GetWellNetwork Fall Prevention Package, a multimedia patient education module designed to help hospitals educate patients and their families on the risks of falls and the precautions they can take to avoid them. The package includes an 11-minute educational video produced by Envision, Inc. that enables hospitals to engage patients in their own care process while providing additional support to the nursing staff and improving patient safety.

Electronic Healthcare Network Accreditation Commission (EHNAC) has re-accredited RelayHealth’s clearinghouses for compliance with industry standards and best practices. With more than 30 years’ industry experience, RelayHealth has established leadership in real-time financial transactions, processing more than 1.48 billion transactions annually between physicians, hospitals, insurers and consumers. After an extensive evaluation of business practices and performing an onsite review, the EHNAC steering committee accredited RelayHealth with exceptional scores.

The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT) today announced that HealthPort’s HealthPort EMR is CCHIT Certified and meets the Commission’s ambulatory electronic health record (EHR) criteria for 2007. In the second year of the program’s operation, the criteria and testing have been significantly enhanced. The Commission added 96 criteria to the 151 original requirements from last year. As a CCHIT Certified product, HealthPort EMR has been tested and passed inspection of 100 percent of a set of updated criteria for functionality, interoperability, and security.