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With the start of the HIMSS Conference in Chicago comes a wave of vendor announcements of new products and other accomplishments. Among them:

The Department of Health and Human Services has released for general availability software developed for the government to aid connecting to a national health information network. The CONNECT application enables federal agencies and private sector provider organizations to exchange electronic patient information. Federal participants in demonstration programs last year included the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, Indian Health Service, Social Security Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Cancer Institute. Harris Corp. developed the software along with Agilex Technologies, Sun Microsystems and Scenpro Inc.

Waukesha, Wis.-based GE Healthcare will work with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to determine if public health agencies can use electronic medical records systems to give physicians timely, patient-specific information at the point of care. They will explore the feasibility of integrating CDC alerts with GE’s Centricity EMR system based on patient record content, using a standard messaging format. The project will determine the EMR’s ability to identify specific patients with risk factors related to the health condition identified in the alert, enabling clinicians to immediately act on the alerts.

Pediatric Associates, a 70-physician group practice serving the Puget Sound region of Washington State, will implement the PrimeSuite electronic health records software of Greenway Medical Technologies Inc., Carrollton, Ga. The application is certified under 2008 CCHIT criteria and includes additional certification requirements for child health. The practice’s eight facilities treat about 250,000 children.

Health care performance analytics software vendor MedeFinance Inc. has changed its name to MedeAnalytics. The new name more accurately reflects the breadth of its clinical, operational and financial software for provider and payer organizations, according to the Emeryville, Calif.-based company.

Chicago-based Allscripts has teamed with systems integration and data exchange platform vendor dbMotion, Pittsburgh, to improve connectivity between hospitals and physicians. Allscripts will offer the dbMotion Solutions set of technologies to its more than 700 health system and hospital clients. Allscripts also announced Allscripts Remote, an application to enable physicians to remotely access its electronic health records software via iPhones and the iPod touch device.

--Joseph Goedert