If they don’t, there will be a lot of money lost. The federal government has proposed $36 billion dollars in incentives to complete the task.

The problem: The feds haven’t finished writing the rules yet.

Right now, just 10% of health care facilities use electronic health records (EHRs), ComputerWorld reports. The governments offering the stimulus funds in the hopes that the number will increase to 50% by 2014.

The money will be available starting next year for facilities that can prove they’re using EHRs in a “meaningful” way. To meet the deadline, experts recommend office begin the project now, even before the government decides what that means.

Keeping in line with its push to provide more services to enterprises, Google recently launched the Google Apps Marketplace, a collection of apps that integrate with Google’s own application.

Similar to the model Apple uses for its app store, the applications are developed by third parties and submitted to Google for inclusion.

The store started with 50 apps, covering categories such as Document Management, Workflow, Project Management, and Security & Workflow.

From South Korea comes the RITI inkbox. You fill the cartridge for with coffee or tea dregs and a little water. You insert it in the printer and start outputting pages, with a brownish ink. The printer is compact and easily portable, with an elegant design.

Unfortunately, there are a few drawbacks with the first version. The quality isn’t very good and the machine is slow and low-capacity. Worst of all, you have to crank the printer by hand. That may be a plus, as you get some exercise and presumably print only the essential. And, if you’re hopped up on caffeine, a little exercise might do you good. Also on the plus side, your documents should smell good!

Yes, it is pretty useless. The machine was the winner of a design contest for Greener Gadgets. But the point is that a lot of minds are making steady progress at making printing inks and toners more eco-friendly and recyclable. There’s still a lot of room for technical breakthroughs, and even some pretty off-the-wall stuff may deserve a look.

Developed in cooperation with IBM, the new software will help IT managers and CFOs get a grip on the true overall costs of running their office equipment, including overall energy usage.

As the press release notes:

“While IT services have become more managed and optimized, most businesses still do not have enough insight into and control of their printing devices’ use and costs. These costs extend beyond the hardware and printers to include consumables, labor for repairs and system updates as well as the high cost of energy and resulting carbon footprint.”

The product, aimed at Ricoh’s enterprise-level customers, is part of a trend that others will, we expect, soon follow. Companies have just in the last few years have started getting a grip on how much they are spending on office printing and copying costs, while trying to find savings in a previously unmanaged are of expenditure. While that has been up to now mostly in terms of consumables, the cost of energy is now gaining attention.

Suddenly, the industry is paying close attention to the environment as a differentiator. Machine trade-in, waste toner recycling, and better manufacturing practices are now common through the industry, and now overall energy consumption is being stressed. Particularly for large companies that have new programs for reducing carbon footprints, the new Ricoh software will be a nice selling point.

According to its own reports, it is facing a $7 billion shortfall this year, and that is estimated to grow to $238 billion over the next decade. It’s desperately trying to find ways to cut expenses (through such moves as stopping Saturday deliveries and closing underused branch offices — both involve lots of Congressional politics) and enhance revenue (those ever-rising mailing costs).

And a consultant study states that total mail volume will drop by 15% over the decade. And we think that that figure greatly underestimates the problem.

Problem is, almost every step they take speeds up the spiral of decline. Higher costs and worse results for business-class mail means that companies find other ways to sell their product. Magazines and newsletters have to spend more and more to send their product, so they are (especially with advertising down) either shutting their doors or going all-digital.

Rising rates for first class postage mean that people connect more and more online, with friends and with companies. Just as the idea of getting a landline phone is alien to cell phone owners younger than thirty, so too is the idea of receiving or paying bills or reading printed catalogs dropping fast for the same group. Even snail mail volume from Netflix, with its 12 million customers, is under heavy threat from digital downloads.

The USPS has tried to get hip: It has improved its online presence, including a sharp iPhone app for tracking mail and finding zip codes. It’s competed against FedEx and UPS at Christmas with a program for setting shipping costs for parcels at volume rather than weight. And it’s expanded sales out of the town post office to retail locations. But it’s not enough.

There’s no doubt that mail service is going to get far more expensive and probably far less convenient. Its demise is also likely to become a major political football, thus being even less likely to get resolved in a logical way. The sad fact is that your business had better be prepared—most companies are building digital processes where possible, but the prospect is that snail mail, as we know it now, will be radically changed within the decade is strong.

It’s a part of a new division at the company, one called Staples Technology Services, that recently announced a major new business-to-business initiative.

In addition to maintaining and managing PCs, servers and networks, the new division is in the business of managing companies’ printing infrastructure: “printing solutions, including comprehensive printer fleet management that maximizes an organization’s assets and saves money.”

The interesting issue is whether Staples will get into the management of copier/MFPs as well as desktop printers. There was a time when copiers weren’t part of the overall IT setup, but those days are long past. If Staples is offering a soup-to-nuts approach to IT and print management, that means integrating copier/MFPs, printer/MFPs and single-function printers. And that means that copier dealers have yet another thing to worry about.

There’s not much chance that Staples will start servicing Canon or Xerox copiers. But there are two likely consequences — replacing at least some of their clients’ copier fleets with high-end printer multifunctionals, a direction the industry is already going in. Second, there’s the possibility of Staples partnering with either a national copier vendor or with local dealers. In either case, it would be likely to be Staples calling the shots on pricing, contract terms and proportion of dealer-channel equipment and retail market machines.

The Staples announcement confirms several trends already in evidence. The concept of offering comprehensive IT and document imaging services is the direction that companies like HP, Dell and Xerox have escalated in recent years. In the more narrow copier-printer area, managed print services is the hottest trend, and vendors and dealers are scrambling to find and train people who can manage and service such contracts. The concept of selling isolated boxes gets more and more irrelevant, while integrated, managed services with reduced overall costs is becoming the industry norm. Staples has the name, the geographic coverage and the bargaining power to become a serious contender.

In February, the browser lost about 0.2%, to end with a 24.2% share of the market, according to the rankings posted by Web measurement vendor NetApplications.com.

Internet Explorer continued to decline, as usual. But instead of Firefox reaping the benefits, Google’s Chrome seems to have taken its place.

Chrome has been climbing for 16 straight months, currently holding a 5.6% share.

Medical records.

About 5.8% of people have been victim of some sort of fraud involving their medical info, according to Poneman Institute survey of 150,000 adults nationwide.

The crimes typically involve stealing insurance-card data to get medicine and services delivered in the victim’s name. The average cost per incident, according to the survey: $20,160.

That includes the efforts required to sort out problems with doctors and insurance companies.

This will likely become one of the big issues as medical institutions are pushed by the government to move to electronic recordkeeping. IT departments will be charged with making sure those electronic documents are protected.

The law, which went into effect March 1, states that all companies that maintain personal information on Massachusetts citizens must conduct an internal security review, have a documented Information Security program (ISP), and set up clear security policies.

If your firm holds personal information (such as Social Security numbers) on any Massachusetts residents, you are required to follow its guidelines, the Boston Herald reports.

Non-compliance could result in fines and lawsuits, as well as bans from doing business with state citizens. The law requires businesses and organizations to:

• designate an information security officer
• develop plans for securing servers, hard disks and laptops
• set up procedures for safe destruction of older data, whether digital or on paper
• train personnel in data security, and
• implement methods for dealing with terminated employees, including cutoff of access to company data.

Now we suspect that this law will be challenged as being a restriction to interstate trade. But that’s hardly a sure thing. And other states are looking at similar regulations. Eventually, this may force the hand of the federal government to set up nationwide security standards.

As one expert notes, the Massachusetts law “is just the beginning of a nationwide movement towards demanding that companies be more proactive in avoiding security breaches that could be devastating to their businesses and their clients.”

On Feb. 28, Microsoft announced it’s working on fixing a bug that affects XP users running IE 7 and IE 8.

The error, which was first discovered by iSEC Security Research, can be used to plant malware on a user’s machine.

The attack uses a malicious Web page containing code disguised as a Windows help file. A pop-up window appears asking the user to hit F1, which starts the installation.

Microsoft’s working on a fix, and may include it in its next regular security update on March 7. In the meantime, warn IE users to avoid suspicious sites and never respond to dialogue boxes without knowing what it’s for. A window with a message like “Press F1 to continue” shouldn’t normally appear on a Web site.