The St. Louis VAMC, John Cochran Division has selected Enterprise
VISion™, a real-time location information system (RTLS) from Versus
Technology, Inc. (Versus) to improve efficiency and safety while
helping to manage their growing patient populations. Specifically, the
St. Louis VAMC, a two-division, tertiary care facility with over 200
hospital beds, will deploy VISion: Clinic™ in their outpatient eye
clinic and VISion: Perioperative Suite™ in their operating room for
automated patient tracking.

CareFusion Corporation, the company that will
become public following the planned spinoff of Cardinal Health’s
clinical and medical products businesses, today launched its new brand
and marked the occasion by providing opportunities for its global
employees to volunteer for non-profit organizations in their
communities.

The American Hospital Association announces the
2009-2010 class of Patient Safety Leadership Fellows. Thirteen
individuals have been selected to participate in this year’s fellowship
class.

Lucian Leape, MD, Adjunct Professor of Health
Policy, Harvard School of Public Health and pediatric surgeon has been
selected as the recipient of the inaugural Florence Nightingale and Dr.
E. Codman Patient Safety Day Award. The award is being given in
conjunction with this year’s 9th annual Patient Safety Day and the 10th
year anniversary of the Institute of Medicine’s groundbreaking patient
safety in America report to Congress.

To identify solutions of nursing care that will
not only address many of the issues facing the profession but also
transform the way Americans receive health care, the IOM and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have
launched a new Initiative on the Future of Nursing.

Hospital discharge is a time during which
patients and families are at their most vulnerable. There is so much
information they need to know, just when they may be least able to
absorb, remember and act on it.

A new report from the Institute of Medicine recommends 100 health topics
that should get priority attention and funding from a new national
research effort to identify which health care services work best. It
also spells out actions and resources needed to ensure that this
comparative effectiveness research initiative will be a sustained
effort with a continuous process for updating priorities as needed and
that the results are put into clinical practice.

By Jeffrey Scott

Healthcare reform
is getting a mind-bending boost from the American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act, with as much as $46 billion being directed toward
Health Information Technology. Managing this effort is the Office of
the National Coordinator for HIT, Dept. of Health and Human Services,
or ‘ONC’ for short. The ONC is spoken of in hushed tones, befitting an
organization with such enormous impact, so I was especially interested
to hear its Director, Dr. David Blumenthal, speak at the recent HIT
Symposium at MIT (June 30 – July 2).

TCS Healthcare Technologies (TCS)
announced today that they have added an interactive text messaging
application and interface to its care management software platform,
supported by Life: WIRE™ Corp, a mobile communications and health
information solution provider.

MEDRAD, Inc. has launched Manage.Report, an
informatics application that enables healthcare professionals to
immediately access clinical and administrative information associated
with radiology patients’ contrast injections from nearly anywhere.