Morning Headlines 12/10/13

Practice Fusion Grabs Another $15M for Electronic Health

Free cloud-based ambulatory EHR vendor Practice Fusion raises another $15 million on its series D round, bringing the round total to $85 million and its lifetime fundraising to nearly $150 million.

Royal Berks suspends Cerner contracts

In England, Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust has suspended two contracts it has with Cerner worth $10 million. The contracts were awarded in 2012 for 10 years of customer support for the Trust’s Cerner Millennium EHR. The contracts were cancelled due to due to higher than anticipated operating costs associated with the project. To bring costs back in line, the Trust cancelled the support contracts and plans to train internal staff to fill the support roles instead.

IMS Health Announces Acquisition of Pygargus

IMS Health, a big-data firm that aggregates and sells large databases of de-identified healthcare data, acquires Pygargus, a Swedish health analytics firm.

You’re Getting Too Much Healthcare

The Atlantic discusses overconsumption of healthcare services in America. According to a recent Institute of Medicine report, 30 percent of total healthcare expenditures in the US are for unneeded care. 42 percent of doctors surveyed in a 2011 Archives of Internal Medicine study reported thinking that their patients were getting more care than necessary.