This week in Healthcare IT

And this week's big news...Allscripts and Eclipsys to merge!

Health IT Business News Roundup for the Week of June 4, 2010

Contracts

Caro Community Hospital in Michigan, Cedar County Memorial Hospital in Missouri, and Salem Township Hospital and Washington County Hospital in Illinois have selected NextGen Healthcare's Inpatient Clinicals suite of decision support, order management and documentation applications...St. Croix Regional Medical Center in Wisconsin has selected NextGen Healthcare's Inpatient Clinicals suite, ambulatory EHR and practice management applications.

Minnesota has selected MEDecision's InFrame health information exchange service and Nexalign health care decision support system for a state employee PHR program...The Electronic Health Network, a provider of patient health education and wellness applications, has selected Cisco's Medical Data Exchange system for deployment in its 22 South Carolina locations.

The Veterans Health Administration has awarded IT company Harris an eight-month, $10.9 million contract to help VA adopt new standards related to the HIPAA privacy and security rules...Manatee County in Florida has selected SCIOinspire's PROGuide care management analytics, work flow and outreach software for its county health plans.

Product Development and Marketing

Drugmaker Pfizer has entered into a partnership with Epocrates, a provider of clinical information and decision support tools, to offer health care providers mobile access to the Pfizer Medical Information Group, a resource for product information and adverse event reporting...BridgeHead Software, a provider of health data storage applications, has announced a partnership with data recovery firm SunGard Availability Services, to jointly distribute the Secure2Disk backup and recovery application to health care providers.

Streamline Health Solutions, a provider of document work flow and management applications, has announced an agreement with MRO, a provider of disclosure management applications and services, to market Streamline Health's document work flow and management applications and MRO's release-of-information processing tools.

Personnel

David Nace -- vice president and medical director of health IT firm McKesson --- has been named to the board of directors of the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative, a coalition of employers, consumers and health care groups that advocate for the medical home model.