M.L. Baker

Uncoordinated efforts between hospitals, vendors, shippers and suppliers are keeping RFID out of hospitals, concludes a new report by Spyglass Consulting Group. Nonetheless, a few applications are poised to become mainstream. Ten percent of HCOs (health care organizations) in the survey use RFID to track expensive mobile equipment. However, 45 percent of those interviewed expected […]

President Bush signed a bill Friday allowing clinicians to report medical errors anonymously. The information will be collected into databases maintained by patient-safety organizations and analyzed for clues as to how to reduce mistakes. The move follows criticism of the FDA that it does not monitor drug safety sufficiently and legislation to limit awards in […]

Consumers are willing to pay as much as $60 a year for EMRs, according to a Web survey released this week by the consultancy group Accenture. But companies may not be able to provide the service necessary to make them useful, implies another Web survey of IT executives by CIOInsight. The Accenture study surveyed about […]

Market-based solutions require a market. But this market need not be simply the average consumer. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has tried to stimulate industry investment in medicines for the developing world by guaranteeing a market for resulting products. The understanding is “If you build it, I will buy.” The government has done the […]

Dozens of GE Healthcare software engineers will soon begin work alongside Intermountain Health Care staff in Utah. The two health IT noteworthies announced plans Wednesday to jointly develop systems that do not just verify that patients receive medications as prescribed by doctors, but also make sure that the medication makes sense. Moreover, constant interaction between […]

In yet another piece of legislation pertaining to health information technology, two Senators are introducing a bill to reward health care providers who report data about high-quality care. If the bill passes, starting in 2007, 1 to 2 percent of Medicare hospital inpatient payments will go into a common pool. The pool will be used […]

Using data, rather than collecting it, was on several attendees minds at the Biotechnology Industry Organization conference in Philadelphia, but ideas about the best way forward may be headed for a clash. Scientists today can generate data in a single afternoon that previously would have required years of work and been considered worthy of a […]

PHILADELPHIA—Nextrials, a software and services company for managing clinical trials, announced here Monday that its products are now integrated with those for conducting and collecting data for trials. The arrangements were finalized over the past few weeks and include Dynarand LLC, Covance Inc., Cardinal Health Inc., Fisher Clinical Services Inc. and Acculogix Inc. For Covance, […]

New legislation proposes awarding a half billion dollars a year for health IT—half in grants, half in loans. The bill was introduced Monday by Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., and would allocate funds from 2006 to 2011. Additional legislation written jointly by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, M.D., R-Tenn., and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., to […]

Three studies on several thousand women have demonstrated that X-ray images are just as accurate as so-called digital mammograms, in which high-tech equipment records images electronically. Digital mammography systems, which were first approved for marketing in the United States in 2000, cost at least three times as much as film systems, according to ECRI, the […]

Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt announced Monday the formation of a “national collaboration” to create a technical standard by which disparate health information technologies would be able to communicate. Leavitt will chair the 17-member American Health Information Community charged with accelerating a nationwide transition to networked electronic health records. Health care costs now […]

Using programs developed to simulate stock markets and warfare, researchers at the University of Chicago have developed software to simulate a more complicated process: the workings of an individual bacterial cell. The tool, called AgentCell, could speed drug discovery and help fight cancer and bioterrorism. Researchers could get results in less time using virtual cells […]