News 2/2/12

Merge Healthcare announces the addition of six orthopaedic practices utilizing its OrthoEMR and 10 radiology practices using Merge RIS.

ADP, parent company of AdvancedMD, announces the acquisition of RCM company PhyLogic Healthcare. The purchase allows AdvancedMD to offer outsourced medical billing to its PM/EHR clients.

Advanced Data Systems integrates its MedicsDocsAssistant EHR with Midmark’s IQecg, IQspiro, and IQholter devices. Here’s a video showing the integration.

As rumored here a couple weeks ago, Greenway Medical goes public Thursday with an $80 million IPO, providing a market cap of $330 million.

NexTech VP Christina Majeed accompanies providers from The London Vision Clinic on a medical mission trip to the Tilganga Institute of Ophthalmology in Nepal, where NexTech had donated its EMR system. Majeed and the London Vision Clinic providers trained staff on the EMR, as well as shadowed doctors and observed surgeries.

Louisiana Health Practitioners select ChartLogic EHR Suite for its four-provider practice.

Kareo opens a sales and customer service office in Indianapolis, managed by Kareo’s national director of sales Jason McDonald. Kareo expects to grow the office from 15 employees to 65 by the end of the year.

University of Kansas researchers look at patient-physician email interactions and find that treatments and lab tests were the most common topics of discussion. Doctors took an average of 23 hours to reply to patients’ emails, suggesting that some physicians place less importance on email as a tool for patient communications.

First-fill medication adherence improves 10% among physicians who adopt e-prescribing technology, compared to physicians not using e-prescribing.

The Rural Assistance Center and the National Rural Health Resource Center develop an online toolkit that helps rural healthcare providers find HIT resources, including EHRs.

Though 80% of physicians believe iPads have a promising future in healthcare, most are skeptical of their ability to transform patient care today. Most physicians still use desktop computers as their primary device for accessing patient data, whether at the office, home, or hospital; mobile devices are used primarily when physicians are outside their normal working environments.

A big welcome to DrFirst, HIStalk Practice’s newest Platinum sponsor. DrFirst is a leader in the standalone e-prescribing market and the first company to establish connections to both RxHub and Surescripts. They are also one of the first companies to offer e-prescribing services for EHR vendors, to provide medication history and electronic prescribing for hospitals, and to transmit prescriptions for controlled substances under a DEA waiver. DrFirst also just introduced its EHR Advisor online tool to help physicians find a solution from those offered by the company’s 200+ EHR vendor partners, all of which are Surescripts certified. The Advisor tool is pretty cool and includes screenshots of different products, downloadable PDFs, and videos. DrFirst is also participating in our Soles4Souls shoe drive at HIMSS and will have a drop-off box (booth 5456) for you to donate your gently used shoes. We appreciate the having DrFirst on board and supporting HIStalk Practice!

Hard to believe, but DrFirst is the 32nd company to sponsor HIStalk Practice. When we launched the site just over three years ago, Mr. H wasn’t sure if enough people would be interested in the ambulatory world to sustain a second site. Today we have over 10,000 readers a month and more than 1,200 subscribers, so I’d like to think Mr. H was wrong (and he’s hardly ever wrong.) Thank you for reading, for telling your HIT ambulatory-loving friends about HIStalk Practice,  and for clicking on a few ads to learn more about the goodies being offered by our sponsors.

The Austin (TX) newspaper profiles DocBookMD, a three-year old company that offers a mobile app for the secure exchange of texts, photos, charts, and X-rays over mobile devices.  The app is offered for free through 80 “sponsoring” medical societies and used by 5,500 doctors in 20 states.  DocBookMD also just announced its raised $2.2 million from investors.

E-mail Inga.

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Mobile.