M.L. Baker

Web surfers who type “migraine” or “chronic headaches” into search engines may soon find themselves facing a solicitation from the Federal Drug Administration. As lawsuits move through the courts about the role of pain-reliever Vioxx in heart attacks, the FDA is considering whether the Internet can be used to see if drugs are prescribed safely. […]

Health information technology legislation is swirling around Capitol Hill this week, and theres no shortage of recommendations of how it should be done. Privacy advocacy groups began circulating a petition Thursday to bar employers from viewing patients health information and giving patients control over who can see what medical information. The heads of the two […]

Making good health care decisions has always been hard. As informatics teases out patients varied health needs, its poised to get even more complex. And doctor-patient visits are still only 10 minutes long. Its an open secret that half of people taking certain long-term, high-cost drugs wont benefit from them. As patients are being asked […]

A typical hospital owns more infusion pumps than licensed beds. Although not every patient needs a pump, leaving many idle, the hospital rents still more of them to be sure that a nurse can find one when its needed. At thousands of dollars a pump, such equipment surpluses are expensive. As a result, many hospitals […]

Health information technology can—and should—be designed to prevent fraud. Such are the conclusions of two studies announced Monday by the AHIMA. Introducing the researchers Monday, national health IT czar David Brailer said hed commissioned the studies in part because of widespread assumptions that health IT could promote fraud by automating fake claims. The researchers examined […]

As part of a push to promote information technology, the health IT czar announced plans Wednesday to track how many physicians are using EHRs. Starting in 2006, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Institute for Health Policy and George Washington University will prepare a series of annual reports that will gauge whether policies that encourage use […]

Patients are increasingly presented with a bewildering array of options to pay for health care. In response, health plans are offering online tools to help patients estimate health expenses under different benefit plans. Now, employers are joining them. ADP Inc, known for processing payrolls and providing related employer services, announced plans Tuesday to offer online […]

Pango Networks Inc. announced Tuesday the launch of a new Web-based framework that can let hospitals know where expensive pieces of equipment are at any time. The framework accepts RFID and other signals onto standards-based networks such as Wi-Fi. Though currently used to track assets in only about one in 10 health care organizations, this […]

Over the next five years, health information technology is likely to focus more and more on administrative functions like claims processing than on clinical functions, like viewing patient care and test results. Thats the conclusion of a group of Harvard Medical School faculty and clinicians established to predict the status of networked health information in […]

How do you take your daily medicine if you cant remember what prescriptions you have? Thats the situation facing many Katrina evacuees with chronic conditions, who now have no record of what drugs they were taking before they fled their homes. Close to a million people displaced by Hurricane Katrina now lack medical records. The […]

A surge in open-source technology offers many businesses a potent combination of power and low cost, but the pharmaceutical industry remains well behind the curve. That was the message at a session on data visualization and integration at a semiannual meeting of the nations chemists in Washington last week. No one thinks open source can […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Intel Corp. became the latest giant IT company to step boldly into health care. At the Tuesday afternoon keynote here, gloomy music played as huge screens flashed dire predictions about the aging population and rising health care costs. Then Louis Burns, general manager of Intels digital health group, strode onto the stage with a […]