With the wide array of health IT products on the market, determining what's essential technology can be difficult. Shahid Shah, enterprise software analyst and creator of the blog The Healthcare IT Guy, suggests the five technologies every hospital should be using.

A new platform created specifically to boost healthcare IT innovation is now available to the public, kicking off a $5,000 competition that challenges developers to create Web applications for patients, physicians and public health.

Usability: the concept is often at the root of slow adoption of EMR systems, and rightfully so. Although effective training and implementation methods affect user adoption rates as well, poor usability has a strong impact on productivity, error rate and user satisfaction.

The new health IT jobs that were promised as part of the government’s big push toward digital medical records are there, and there are plenty of job seekers to fill them, but are they the right people for the jobs?

It's noble and potentially cost-efficient, but embracing the "go green" trend isn't simple. Jerry Buchanan of eMids Technologies shares five powerful green IT practices for healthcare.

Automated care coordination gaining traction in physician, homecare sectors.

A significant portion of healthcare activities can be done on a remote basis. By electronically linking patient and provider, chronic disease management, prescription renewals, vital sign monitoring and various other services can be accomplished for a fraction of the cost of a personal office visit.

A survey sponsored by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) and Dell has found that the data centers of small and medium-sized hospitals in North America, Europe, and China are not prepared for the "wave of data" that will soon be inundating them.

The sustained build-up of automation technology in healthcare over the past decade has led many organizations to an impasse. After working frantically to create sound IT architectures for clinical, administrative and financial management systems, they have now reached a point where they need to assess exactly what they have, what their technology can do and how it should evolve going forward.

President Barack Obama asked Congress for $76.8 billion for the Department of Health and Human Services Thursday in a fiscal year 2010 federal budget outline.

Stage 3 of the EMR Adoption Model, devised by HIMSS Analytics, to track EMR progress at hospitals and health systems, is growing very quickly, said Mike Davis, executive vice president. Hospitals a...

In March, the big question weighing on the minds of policymakers was a crucial one: Wait, or move ahead on Stage 2 of meaningful use?

Just three days past the Jan. 6 opening day for providers to register for meaningful use incentives, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that some 4,000 healthcare providers had signed up.

The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) has launched its HIM Jobs for America initiative, and announced a public-private partnership with the Department of Health and Human Services. The announcement came last month at the association’s 83rd annual convention in Salt Lake City.

Google Health’s recent announcement that it will discontinue its personal health record vault service has analysts from around the industry questioning whether PHRs are a workable information source in their current form.

The Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday awarded $40 million in grants to public health departments across the country to help them strengthen their performance, efficiency and infrastructure, including health IT systems. The grants are also aimed at creating jobs.

With PACS and other diagnostic imaging files quickly diminishing healthcare data storage capacities, providers are scrambling to find a much larger repository to handle their needs. More and more, that means gravitating toward the cloud, IT vendors say.

From unproven mobile platforms to legacy EHRs, some healthcare IT should just be avoided. Shahid Shah follows his list of <a href="http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/5-technologies-every-hospital-should-be-using">"5 technologies every hospital should be using"</a> with five IT practices to avoid at all costs.

They say the early bird gets the worm. In this case, 69,099 worms (or ICD-10 diagnostic codes) warrant an ahead-of-the-game approach to transition. Melanie Endicott gives us five tips for ICD-10 success.

New healthcare IT jobs are part of the Jobs Initiatives for Rural America, which was announced by President Obama on Aug. 16 at the White House Rural Economic Forum. The plan includes making Department Health and Human Services (HHS) loans available to help more than 1,300 critical access hospitals recruit additional staff, and helping rural hospitals purchase software and hardware to implement health IT.