Briefs

Brailer Steps Down as National Coordinator

HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt announced the resignation of David Brailer as the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology April 20.

Brailer, who served two years in the post, will serve as vice-chair of the American Health Information Community, which is charged with making recommendations to the Secretary of HHS to facilitate the development and adoption of standards-based health IT. Brailer has helped the group identify promising breakthroughs for near-term progress while working to move HHS closer to longer-term health IT goals.

Brailer will also continue to serve as a con- sultant to HHS to help lead the president’s healthcare transparency initiative. Until a replacement is announced, the work of the Office of the National Coordinator will continue under the leadership of the four permanent directors of the office.

Lowry Computer Products Unveils RFID

Lowry Computer Products unveiled a range of radiofrequency identification (RFID) pharmaceutical applications at Interphex in New York City last month.

Among the products is a tabletop wrap-around automated labeling system, designed to apply bar code and pre-programmed RFID labels onto any cylindrical product, such as pharmaceutical bottles, according to Mark Brown, Lowry’s vice president of new business development. Brown said the system can label up to 100 parts per minute.

The company also has introduced a product for pharmacies, the electronic product code (EPC) Generation 2 mousepad reader, which has a tunable RFID read range of one inch to six feet, and is designed for point-of-sale terminals, item-level kiosks and similar applications. A third product the company unveiled was a mobile RFID cart.

Lowry Computer Products is a manufacturer and integrator of wireless, RFID, bar code and data collection solutions.