Category: News Etc

The Huffington Post, September 9, 2010 — Ron Gutman
The remarkable report “Initial Lessons From the First National Demonstration Project on Practice Transformation to a Patient-Centered Medical Home,” in the May/June Annals of Family Medicine, makes this point about the state of primary care information technology (IT): “Technology needed for the PCMH [patient-centered medical home] is not plug and play. … The hodgepodge of information technology marketed to primary care practices resembles more a pile of jigsaw pieces than components of an integrated and interoperable system.”…
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CONNECT Blog, September 2, 2010 — Greg Fairnak
The researchers at Harvard University think so and so do I. Last week I had the chance to attend the first developer’s conference for the Substitutable Medical Applications, reusable technologies, or SMArt. The architecture will provide a set of core services to facilitate substitutable healthcare applications, or plug-ins, similar to the App Store found in the iPad, iTouch or Droid. In attendance were open source solution vendors, healthcare IT thought leaders (Stan Huff and John Halamka), commercial healthcare application vendors, researchers, software developers and federal healthcare agency representatives (FDA, VA and DoD)….
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The Health Care Blog, April 24, 2010 — David Kibbe
Clinical Groupware is rapidly gaining acceptance as a term describing a new class of affordable, ergonomic, and Web-based care management tools. Since David first articulated Clinical Groupware’s conceptual framework on this blog early last year, we’ve been discussing Clinical Groupware with a growing number of people and organizations who want to know what it is, where it’s going, and what problems it may solve, particularly for small and medium size medical practices, their patients and their institutional/corporate sponsors and networks…
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Mass High Tech, June 24, 2010 — James M. Connolly
Using cloud computing in the health information technology sector makes sense from a cost basis, but it could take years for health-care providers and patients to develop solid confidence in the security of patient data in cloud environments…
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SearchHealthIT (TechTarget), June 9, 2010 — Don Fluckinger
Want to download a 99-cent electronic health record (EHR) system from a health care open source app store? There’s not an app for that. But if Dr. Isaac Kohane, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Boston, professor at Harvard Medical School and self-described “pasty, pointy-headed nerd,” realizes his ambition, that could be a reality in two years…
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Life as a Healthcare CIO Blog, April 12, 2010 — John Halamka
Last week, ONC awarded $60 million to four institutions – Mayo Clinic, Harvard University, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – through the Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) program…
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The Huffington Post, March 18, 2010 — Fred Schulte
Hoping to provide the backbone for a grand plan to put the nation’s medical records online, federal officials have been quietly retooling an obscure government data-sharing service into a robust new Health Internet. The concept has drawn intense interest from technology firms, including Microsoft and Google, which are scrambling to find new–and profitable–uses for digital medical records and the cyber health-care services they are starting to spawn…
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The Washington Post, October 25, 2009 — Alexi Mostrous
In a health-care debate characterized by partisan bickering, most lawmakers agree on one thing: American medicine needs to go digital. When President Obama designated $19.5 billion to expand the use of electronic medical records, former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said it was one of only “two good things” in February’s stimulus package. But such bipartisan enthusiasm has obscured questions about the effectiveness of health information technology products, critics say. Interviews with more than two dozen doctors, academics, patients and computer programmers suggest that computer systems can increase errors, add hours to doctors’ workloads and compromise patient care…
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