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The Deval Patrick, Tim Murray Administration announced Laurance Stuntz, senior vice president at NaviNet (Boston, Mass.), as the new director of the Massachusetts eHealth Institute (MeHI). MeHI, which received $24 million in federal Recovery Act funding, has been asked to develop the Massachusetts Regional Extension Center and initiate a statewide Health Information Exchange (HIE).

Indiana Health Information Exchange, Inc. (IHIE) is partnering with SeeMyRadiology.com, a cloud-based medical imaging platform, to make it easier for Indiana physicians and hospitals to access and share radiology images with the launch of ImageZone, a cloud-based medical image sharing platform that provides a digital alternative to the traditional methods of sharing radiology images on hard copy films and CDs.

About a year ago, researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School launched an intriguing research project to study what would happen if patients had regular access to their primary care physicians’ notes about their visits. On April 25, the investigators discussed some of their findings during a National eHealth Collaborative webinar.

The Colorado Regional Health Information Organization (CORHIO), alongside a multi-stakeholder behavioral health steering committee and other communities across its state, has issued a report with recommendations and future strategies for effective inclusion of behavioral health in health information exchange (HIE).

Cloud computing is becoming a valuable tool for hospitals, and there are good reasons for that, as more organizations digitize their clinical systems. I recently had a conversation with Richard Temple, executive consultant at Beacon Partners, Inc., Weymouth, Mass. Typically, a lot of the computerization by hospitals has centered on financial systems, and hospitals typically wanted to keep that information close, housing it in their own data centers, he says. But things were more manageable, in terms of what needed to be available. After all, if a billing system went down at night, lives didn’t hang in the balance. But with the advent of the computerization of clinical systems, hospitals are faced with requirements of uptime and redundancy. “Hospitals aren’t necessarily geared up to support a computing infrastructure of that magnitude, so they look to the cloud,” Temple says.