Justin Lanning, President and CEO of CredenceHealth said, “OhioHealth’s vision and drive for efficient effective quality care are apparent throughout the entire organization. Our team is excited about partnering with OhioHealth to provide our innovative real-time clinically focused solutions.”

U.S. News & World Report’s annual Best Hospitals rankings are out today, and we asked Avery Comarow, the magazine’s health rankings editor, whether the rankings will ever incorporate meaningful use benchmarks or other indicators of IT adoption. In an email, he says that “it’s safe to say that meaningful use of HIT will be folded into the Best Hospitals methodology at some point — provided that a link between such a measure and clinical quality can be established.”

“The sheer number of HIE vendors vying for provider mindshare makes finding the right solution uniquely challenging,” said Jason Hess, general manager of clinical research for KLAS and author of the new report. “Technology, cost and integration were the selection criteria most often mentioned by prospective buyers, but evaluating those factors is especially difficult when most HIE vendors can point to only a handful of live deployments.”

Q: HIMSS says it chose Nashville because it believes Nashville will have a larger, more “comprehensive” facility (and Nashville’s plans call for a project roughly three times larger than Cleveland’s). What would your response be to a prospective tenant you’re trying to sell to who has the same perception? A: My understanding of their project is that it isn’t fully funded and they won’t have the healthcare focus that we will. Vanderbilt University Medical Center is a fine institution but it doesn’t compare to what Cleveland and Northeast Ohio bring to the table from an institutional perspective, as a center of innovation, design or specialty manufacturing. My understanding is that the Nashville convention center is a general-purpose facility. The Cleveland Convention Center will be focused on healthcare and more closely linked to the medical mart function.

The Methodist contract is one of the most visible examples of what Dell hopes to accomplish with its $3.09 billion 2009 acquisition of Perot Systems, a specialist in health-care information technology. Dell is hoping it can use the unit to move up the technology food chain, offering higher-margin services that complement its relatively low-margin hardware. If successful, the strategy would help Dell combat a slowdown in its core computer business that has pushed it from being the world's largest computer maker to No. 3, behind Hewlett-Packard Co. and Acer Inc.