The Microsoft Healthcare Innovation Awards, now in its twelfth year, is an opportunity to showcase how your organization and your customer's organization, is using technology to enhance and transform the quality of patient care, reduce costs, streamline clinical and business processes, drive interoperability, improve productivity and workflow, and enable informed decisions.

A major project to implement full e-prescribing and drug administration across three acute care sites in Birmingham's Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust has commenced. The Trust's Board has chosen to implement JAC's E-Prescribing and Medicines Administration (EPMA) system to ensure best practice for patient safety.

Royal Philips Electronics (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHI) and Hansen Medical, Inc. (Nasdaq: HNSN) have signed joint development and cooperation agreements to co-develop integrated products that may simplify complex cardiac procedures to diagnose and treat irregular heartbeats, also known as arrhythmias.

The St. Elisabeth Hospital in Leipzig has become one of the first hospitals in Germany to commission a KODAK DIRECTVIEW DR 9500 System from Carestream Health. The new equipment offers the advantage of both increased functionality and high patient throughput, utilising workstations with variable examination profiles.

A partnership between Tunstall, Fold Housing Association, Housing 21, DigiTV and the University of Sheffield will deliver an innovative research project to develop a Virtual Extra Care Service (VIRTEx) within local communities.

Hospitals and other public institutions, just like private companies, feel the growing importance of optimizing their sourcing processes and organizing their procurement more efficiently due to financial reasons. "eVergabe", developed by the Hessian software provider Healy Hudson, is the first e-tendering solution for the European healthcare sector and is already in use by four procurement associations.

ETIAM has released a new version (3.40) of DICOM Izer, a powerful solution for capturing, converting and distributing non DICOM images to PACS. Improved productivity and conformance to connectivity and interoperability standards are the prime enhancements of this new version.