(TeleTracking Technologies: Pittsburgh) -- Renowned quality expert A. Blanton Godfrey, Ph.D., board chairman of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) and one of the creators of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, will be the featured speaker when TeleTracking Technologies celebrates 20 years of enhancing hospital efficiency at its annual client conference Oct.

(Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: Princeton, NJ) -- The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has launched the nation’s most comprehensive online directory for patients to find reliable information on the quality of health care provided by physicians and hospitals in their communities. From Maine to California, medical patients can scroll over a U.S.

(Geomagic: Leuven, Belgium) -- Geomagic and Nikon Metrology recently announced a cooperative agreement that enables Nikon Metrology to fully integrate and offer its entire range of handheld 3-D laser scanners with Geomagic Studio, Geomagic Qualify, and Geomagic Wrap software.

Twitter allows millions of social media fans to comment in 140 characters or less on just about anything: an actor’s outlandish behavior, an earthquake’s tragic toll or the great taste of a grilled cheese sandwich.

(Medline Industries: Mundelein, IL) -- Dr. Carolyn Clancy, director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ); Dr. Mark Chassin, president of the Joint Commission; and Aron Ralston, the focus of the academy award-nominated movie 127 Hours, are among the keynote speakers at Medline’s fourth annual Prevention Above All conference scheduled for Aug. 21–23, 2011, in Chicago at the Palmer House Hilton Hotel.

(3M Infection Prevention: St. Paul, MN) -- 3M Infection Prevention and RL Solutions announced a joint feasibility program to provide health care-facilities data on the rate of infection in real time, along with the costs associated with those infections.

(AMN Healthcare, San Diego) -- Health care facility administrators and physicians report that the most serious obstacle they face in forming Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) is physician alignment, according to a new survey.

The survey, conducted by AMN Healthcare, the largest health care staffing and workforce solutions organization in the United States, asked hospital executives and physicians about their participation in ACOs, and whether or not ACOs will deliver significant cost and quality benefits.

The free, on-demand presentation, “An Introduction to the Model for Improvement,” from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) is a simple yet powerful approach to achieving rapid and significant improvements in health care delivery and outcomes.

(AHRQ: Rockville, MD) -- States are seeing improvements in health care quality, but disparities for their minority and low-income residents persist, according to 2010 State Snapshots, a web-based resource recently released by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).

(Thomson Reuters: Ann Arbor, MI) -- Thomson Reuters has released its third annual study identifying the 10 top U.S. health systems based on quality of care, efficiency, and patient satisfaction.