With more than one million patient contacts each year, Lee Memorial Health System considers patient engagement the order of the day every day. For Mike Smith, CIO of the six-hospital, 1,423-bed organization based in Fort Myers, Fla., this enterprise-wide emphasis means constantly working to ramp up IT-enabled interactions via—among other interfaces—an increasingly in-demand patient portal.

Locum tenens physicians and other healthcare workers looking for temporary gigs—along with healthcare providers hoping to employ them—have a new mobile and online tool to quickly find one another. 

Mammography is making headlines again with the recently released United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) draft breast cancer screening recommendations—bookended by a humbling prediction from the National Cancer Institute that breast cancer cases could increase by 50 percent over the next 15 years. 

Breast-imaging interpretations by telemedicine? More than a few have said that it couldn’t be done—or, at least, that it couldn’t be done well.

What do you do with legacy data-storage applications containing near-antique patient information—so old it hasn’t been accessed in up to 20 years—that may yet be needed for legal, financial, clinical or population-management purposes?

It’s T-minus two and a half years, give or take, on the liftoff of Meaningful Use stage 3. In 2018, every eligible hospital and eligible professional must attest to a single set of eight objectives—or suffer reduced Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements—in what is expected to be the final and definitive MU stage.

The American Medical Association is warning medical practices to beware private payors bearing virtual credit cards. The “convenient” payment method is increasingly being used to conceal hefty—and avoidable—fees.

McKesson’s business performance services division has won the business of Elmhurst Radiologists, a 12-doc practice operating within 259-bed Elmhurst Memorial Hospital, part of the three-hospital Edward-Elmhurst system outside Chicago.