Brian T. Horowitz

A holding company with more than 400 subsidiaries, Virgin Group is involved in air travel, telecommunications, vacations, publishing and even vodka distillation. Virgin can track your health, too. Virgin HealthMiles, a company that offers wellness programs focused on employee engagement, has introduced the “Spring ’12 release” of its real-time health data dashboard platform. The Web-based […]

Emory Healthcare in Atlanta says that it has misplaced 10 backup disks containing information for 315,000 patients. The health system provides clinical care as part of the Robert W. Woodruff Health Sciences Center of Emory University. Emory announced the data breach on April 18. The health system didn’t immediately respond to eWEEK‘s request for comment. […]

Supercomputing and big data have taken yet another step forward in leading to new treatment for cancer. Schrödinger, a company that offers molecular-modeling and drug-design software, and Nimbus Discovery are using Cycle Computing’s 50,000-core supercomputer to run a virtual screen to find a protein target responsible for cancer. Schrödinger helps fund the work of Nimbus, […]

In the age of electronic health records and remote-monitoring apps, faxing is still alive, especially in health care. But you’ll find the old-school technology being used in the cloud by companies such as Barnes Healthcare Services, a medical equipment company based in Valdosta, Ga. Biscom’s cloud faxing product, called, Faxcom Anywhere, allows Barnes to send […]

Patients may be a step ahead of their local hospitals in adopting social media tools, a new report by consulting firm PwC suggests. For its report “Social Media ‘Likes’ Healthcare: From Marketing to Social Business,” released April 17, the Health Research Institute at PwC interviewed 1,060 U.S. consumers. The consulting firm found that four in […]

Big data has a big role in furthering cancer research and treatment. Verizon is working on a new partnership with NantWorks to develop the Cancer Knowledge Action Network, a cloud database that will help doctors improve cancer care. NantWorks makes ultra-low-power semiconductors, supercomputers and advanced networks for health care, commerce and digital entertainment. The Cancer […]

At the TEDMed conference in Washington, D.C, Xerox announced research efforts aimed at digitizing patient information and using natural-language technology to collect unstructured medical data and convert it into formats that can be read by computer applications. Among the projects Xerox unveiled April 10 is the Digital Nurse Assistant from its Parc division. Parc is […]

You’ve heard it before, but a weak password was once again the cause of a data breach. On March 30 a hacker from Eastern Europe illegally accessed a Utah Department of Technology Services (DTS) server containing Social Security numbers for the Medicaid claims. DTS provides technology services to Utah state agencies. The breach involved both […]

Although health care organizations deal with many types of government and professional regulations, as adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) progresses, they also need to form policies of their own to secure patient data, according to an April 11 report from HIMSS Analytics and Kroll Advisory Solutions, a provider of IT security. HIMSS Analytics performs […]

As Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced plans on April 9 to push back the deadline for the International Classification of Diseases (ICD)-10 claims-coding system to 2014, the health care IT industry responded with mixed feedback. The proposed delay of one year strikes a fair balance of giving more time to […]

Among health care providers in the United States, social media is used for marketing, but globally, the tools are used more for care management and patient education, according to a new report by CSC, an IT integrator and cloud service provider. In its white paper “Should Healthcare Organizations Use Social Media?” CSC takes a look […]

Tracking your health is fun and games if you’re at St. Barnabas Senior Services in Los Angeles. Microsoft and the City of Los Angeles Department of Aging have announced a project at the facility in which seniors improve their chronic conditions through the use of Microsoft Kinect for Xbox 360. Kinect is a controller-free device […]