This Week in Healthcare IT

courtesy, as always, of ihealthbeat.org

Health IT Business News Roundup for the Week of June 11, 2010

M&A, Financial Reports and Funding

Halfpenny Technologies, a provider of health information exchange applications, has acquired Laboratory Management Services, a provider of clinical data acquisition and reporting tools for health plans and clinical laboratories, for an undisclosed sum.

Contracts

Picis, a global provider of information tools for acute care settings, has selected Clinical Architecture's Symedical interoperability application...The New York eHealth Collaborative, a regional health IT extension center for New York state, has selected Greenway Medical Technologies as a preferred EHR provider for the health care providers it serves.

IASIS Healthcare plans to implement Wolters Kluwer Health's UpToDate clinical decision support software in its 16 hospitals covering six states...Cook Children's Medical Center in Texas has selected Patient Care Technology Systems' Amelior Tracker system for medical equipment tracking.

University of Buffalo School of Medicine has selected Allscripts' EHR system for its 450 physicians...WakeMed Health & Hospitals in North Carolina has adopted Ingenious Med and Thomson Reuters' Clinical Xpert Billing charge capture application.

Product Development and Marketing

Dell, a computer manufacturer, has entered into a partnership with Practice Fusion, an online EHR provider, to offer a package of hardware, software and online services to doctors in small and mid-sized medical practices...MEDecision, a provider of health care management applications, has entered into a partnership with NaviNet, a health care communications network, to offer patient clinical summaries to health care providers in NaviNet's network.

Allscripts, an EHR vendor, has entered into a partnership with software vendor RemitDATA to market RemitDATA's Reimbursement Pro revenue cycle management software. Softheon, a health care software business provider, has entered into a partnership that will allow Softheon to implement FalconStor Software's data protection applications to create cloud-based data protection tools for the health care industry.

Personnel

Angela Kennedy -- professor and chair of the Health Informatics and Information Management program at Louisiana Tech University -- has been selected to serve as chair of the board for the Commission on Accreditation of Health Informatics and Information Management Education, an accreditation organization for health IT degree programs...Kel Callahan -- former vice president of business development for HIPAAT International, a provider of health IT privacy applications -- has been selected as the firm's president and COO.

Ed Park -- chief technology officer of athenahealth -- has been named executive vice president and COO of the company...Jeremy Delinsky -- senior vice president of athenahealth's athenaNet Intelligence division -- has been named the CTO of the company...Derek Hedges -- senior vice president of business development and product strategy at athenahealth -- has been named senior vice president of corporate development for the company.

John Hoyt -- former leader of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society's organizational affiliate program -- has been named executive vice president for organizational services at HIMSS and executive head for HIMSS Analytics...Franklin Baumann -- former medical director at health insurer UnitedHealthcare -- has been appointed chief medical officer of Emdeon, a provider of health care revenue and payment cycle management applications.

Reese Gomez -- senior vice president and owner/partner with Dearborn Advisors, a health IT consulting firm -- has been named managing director and national practice leader of management consulting for maxIT Healthcare, a provider of IT consulting services for health care providers.