The awards are intended to make health IT available to more than 100,000 hospitals and primary care physicians by 2014 and train thousands of people for careers in health care and IT.

Of the more than $750 million being awarded by the Department of Health and Human Services, $386 million will go to 40 states and qualified state-designated entities to facilitate health information exchange at the state level, and $375 million will go to an initial 32 not-for-profit organizations to support the development of regional extension centers that will help health professionals as they work to implement and use health IT. This assistance at the state and regional levels will facilitate healthcare providers' efforts to adopt and use electronic health records in a meaningful manner.

The more than $225 million being awarded by the Department of Labor will be used to train 15,000 people in job skills needed to access careers in health care, IT, and other high-growth fields. Through existing partnerships with local employers, the grant recipients have identified about 10,000 job openings for skilled workers that likely will become available in the next two years in areas such as nursing, pharmacy technology, and IT. The grants will fund 55 separate training programs in 30 states to help train people for secure, well-paid health jobs and meet the growing employment demand for health workers.

• 45 percent of all stays in rural hospitals in 2007 vs. 35 percent in urban hospitals.

• 55.7 percent of aggregate costs in rural hospitals vs. 44.3 percent in urban hospitals.

Enterprise risk management is a process, effected by the entity’s board of directors, management, and other personnel, applied in strategy-setting and across the enterprise, designed to identify potential events that may affect the entity, and manage risk to be within the risk appetite, to provide reasonable assurance regarding the achievement of objectives.

• Federal and state spending on Medicaid, the nation's primary health insurance program for low-income Americans, jumped nearly 10% in 2009, according to the report.

• Medicare spending, meanwhile, shot up just over 8%.

• Fueled by new technology, an aging population, rising incomes and other changes, spending on medical care has been consuming a larger and larger share of the nation's economy for years, jumping from about 5% of the gross domestic product in 1960 to nearly 14% in 2000.

• Even now, with the economy slowly recovering, the government expects that the growth of healthcare spending will outpace the expansion of the economy. By 2020, 1 of every 5 dollars spent in the U.S. is expected to go to healthcare.

The data-driven convention known as analytics has been around for "a long time," according to Harris. The term generally refers to the process of using decision-support systems, business intelligence, statistics, executive-information systems, and predictive models to give companies a competitive edge. Today, says Harris, analytics is taking "center stage" in high-performance organizations that have discovered ways to put data to work to improve profitability. ...

California winemakers E&J Gallo provide another example of analyzing intangible factors to boost bottom-line results. Harris explains that the wine-making family's new generation of executives, armed with Harvard MBA degrees, focused on a relatively new metric that influences the price of wine: ratings awarded by Wine Spectator magazine. Basically, a wine rated 90 or better by the magazine can be sold for more than a bottle rated 80.