In line with the previous quarter, Agfa HealthCare's sales decreased by 5.5 percent to 275 million Euro. The market environment and the activity levels were in line with the previous quarter. The business group's profitability showed considerable improvement. In the Imaging segment, this was mainly due to lower raw material prices and increased operational efficiency. Article of the Month!
GE Healthcare announced the launch of eHealth, a new business unit offering enhanced connectivity to clinicians and patients designed with data privacy and security features to enable health information sharing that can help increase efficiency, reduce error and improve health outcomes. 
As leader of the European Union funded HYPERImage research project, Royal Philips Electronics (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHI) announced that the project has achieved a major milestone in its ambitious plan to create a new medical imaging technique called hybrid PET/MR. 
InterSystems Corporation announced that the Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has linked nine of its applications, including its Electronic Discharge Summary and Theatre systems, with data from its Patient Administration System using the InterSystems Ensemble® integration platform. 
From today GPs will be receiving deliveries of the Pandemrix vaccine and will begin contacting 'at risk' groups for Swine Flu vaccination appointments. It was recently reported that there are fears that the backlog of post following the current Royal Mail strikes will affect the programme, resulting in 'at risk' groups missing their appointments and therefore delaying getting their vaccination. 
SNOMED-compliant electronic prescribing will be rolled out at CircleBath Hospital in a new contract announced between First DataBank (FDB) and ALERT Life Sciences Computing (ALERT). FDB's Multilex Drug Data File (Multilex DDF) will be integrated with ALERTâ Paper Free Hospital to enable clinicians at CircleBath Hospital to benefit from innovative SNOMED-compliant electronic clinical decision support in prescribing, dispensing and administration.