This Week’s Health IT Business News

The lead story of the week is Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s choice of Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate. Representative Ryan of Wisconsin is the architect of the GOP’s plans to overhaul Medicare. Read more about Romney’s decision at the Washington Post.

On the heels of HHS reporting  that 21 million have been affected by health data breaches since 2009 comes the news story of hackers encrypting the health records of an Illinois clinic and holding the data for ransom. Unlike other data breaches the hackers made no attempt to keep their presence a secret. After encrypting the information, they posted a digital ransom note demanding payment for the password. Rick Kam,  President of ID Experts and guest blogger for both this site and HIEAnswers.net is quoted in the story.  Read the full story at Bloomberg.com.

[Related Article: Top 3 Issues Facing Patient Privacy]

After a difficult start to the year, Allscripts reported a Q2 2012 adjusted net income of $8 million on $370 million earnings. You may recall the management and earnings troubles that plagued the EHR giant earlier this year. They’ve since rallied as reported by Healthcare IT News with Q2 numbers. You can read this transcript of Allscripts Q2 2012 earnings call held on August 8, 2012.

The latest research released by GlobalData on the mHealth market puts its current worth in 2011 at $1.2 billion with a projected climb to $11.8 billion by 2018. GlobalData attributes the substantial predicted growth to the widespread use of mobile phones, making mHealth the fastest growing segment in the telemedicine market. Read the full press release here. 

[Related Article: mHealth Gaining Momentum]

In other technology news this week IMS Research reported that the wearable technology market will exceed $6 Billion by 2016. Current wearable devices are concentrated around a few products primarily in the healthcare/medical, and fitness and wellness application areas. Wearable technology transmits data such as vital signs,  track user performance, glucose levels and more.

healthsystemCIO.com reported this week that a new report released by KLAS shows Epic and Cerner have moved into first and second place, respectively, for EHR market share in the category of hospitals with over 200 beds. Read the full story here.

PatientsLikeMe, a health information sharing website for patients, has taken in $2 million in equity from 11 unnamed investors. How will the money be used? According to an article posted on Medcity, a company representative  declined to comment. Shocker.

In contract news this week SimonMed Imaging announced its selection of Merge Healthcare to share images and achieve meaningful use. In the press release issued Dr. John Simon, CEO of SimonMed Imaging stated “With image access across all of our locations and an MU-certified platform, we are well positioned to lead the delivery of integrated care in each of the communities we serve across the country.” Read the full release here.

There were a couple of very notable personnel announcements reported this week. Edwin Miller, formerly with Practice Fusion and athenahealth, was named named Vice President of product management for CareCloud. Miller will oversee the continued development of CareCloud’s Cloud-Based EHR and mobile offerings. It was also announced that Ralph Reyes, a founding partner at KLAS, and Jonathan Russel, formerly of GE Healthcare, were named new Vice Presidents for ClearDATA, a health care cloud-computing platform and service provider. Together they will lead ClearData’s strategic account relationships and channel sales.

And in our own bit of business news this week we launched our companion site HIEAnswers.net. The site provides content, reporting and commentary to help providers understand Health Information Exchange and what is required to stay current with Federal initiatives.

Do you have a bit of business news you’d like to share for this column?  Email me at carol@hitechanswers.com.