Fierce Healthcare: The New Hampshire's Commission of Healthcare Quality Assurance has established a campaign intended to foster safe hand-washing practices in hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers.

The guidelines for this program is prepared by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). Their goal is to achieve 100 percent compliance on hand-washing rules and regulations.

Some features of the program:

• Making hand hygiene supplies accessible

The Houston Chronicle reports, a new Web site designed to help consumers and small businesses learn more about their health insurance options.

It offers a range of ways to compare health plans, including side-by-side comparisons of monthly premiums, deductibles and coverage options. Users of the site can search for information in various ways, such as plans with monthly premiums of less than $100 or deductibles under $500 annually.

Health Data Management: Web Site Enables Misdiagnosis Sharing

A web portal has beed designed to enable patients and their families to share and learn about the impact of medical misdiagnoses, in Franklin, TN.

Health Data Management: Hospitals using the MedMined hospital-acquired infection tracking application from Cardinal Health will soon be able to compare their HAI rate with other similar facilities.

The Dublin, Ohio-based vendor developed a benchmarking tool earlier this year with input from the Alabama Hospital Quality Initiative.

OutofPocket.com, a technology startup dedicated to promoting health care transparency and competition, announced the launch of its new search engine. The search engine enables consumers to look up prices and comparison shop for health care services by searching for price data across websites.

An earlier version of their website was launched in July 2007. It provided consumers with a platform to collaborate and expose the true prices of routine health care services.