M.L. Baker

If youre allergic to aspirin, avoid having a heart attack where doctors cant access your medical record. Clinicians are sure to prescribe the drug, which will do you more harm than good. The same principle applies for dozens of other conditions in which optimal care for most is dangerous for some. However, those from Massachusetts, […]

The premise of pay for performance is hard to disagree with: Doctors and institutions that provide better care should earn more money. This premise, however, is hampered by two facts: No one knows the best way to implement such a program, and if different health care payers implement different programs, the effects will be diluted. […]

PALO ALTO, Calif.—The American health system is “saturated with inefficiency,” Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said Monday at a gathering of Stanford medical faculty and students. In 1960, health care costs came to about 5 percent of the GDP (gross domestic product), he said. Now it is estimated at about 15 percent. Other […]

SALT LAKE CITY—Health advocates clamoring to substitute paper charts with electronic ones are shortsighted. Thats according to Rick Peters of the American Academy of Family Physicians, who gave the keynote address this week at Toward an Electronic Patient Record, an annual conference sponsored by the Medical Records Institute. The health IT community needs to stop […]

SALT LAKE CITY—”The products have increased, but the fundamental issues are the same.” Thats how Richard Ward, CEO of Reward Health Sciences, Inc. summed up this years Toward an Electronic Patient Record conference. When he last attended the conference in 2001, Ward made a list of what he considered the fundamentals and unchallenged assumptions of […]

SALT LAKE CITY—Companies selling electronic medical record systems pit their IT against pens and paper this week at the Medical Records Institutes conference here. On Tuesday and Wednesday, nineteen companies selling EMRs (electronic medical record systems) were each given seven minutes—the time clinicians generally need to document a patient visit—to show their product. The event, […]

Fewer than one in four physicians keep their patients information in an EMR. At this years Toward an Electronic Patient Record conference, some 100 vendors of electronic medical record system came to tout their wares. But for physicians working in offices with just a few practitioners, the biggest decision may not be picking a product […]

SALT LAKE CITY—The nonprofit Medical Records Institute announced the winners of its sixth annual awards in several health IT categories at its annual TEPR (Toward an Electronic Patient Record) Conference Monday night. eClinicalWorks captured honors in three categories in which it had not been represented in 2004: first honors in e-prescribing and EHR (electronic health […]

Edward Fotsch wants to take clipboards out of doctors offices. The CEO of Medem, a company providing Internet-based services to doctors, this week reached out to patients with the chance to create their own online, password-protected personal health records. That way, doctors can grab relevant information from the Internet instead of from scattered slips of […]

When a patients heart begins to fail, blood loses its forward thrust. Fluid builds up in the lungs, abdomen and lower limbs, causing dry cough and sudden weight gain. Catching and addressing these signs quickly can avert a crisis—trips to the emergency room, hospitalization and worse. Hoping to catch the process in its earliest stages—to […]

On Tuesday, IBM launched an effort to build a prototype infrastructure for health information exchange, complete with speeches by the nations health IT czar. On Wednesday, IBM said it would acquire HealthLink Inc., a highly regarded health IT consulting company with over 500 consultants. And on Thursday, IBM announced a $400 million deal with the […]

A few months after the nations health IT czar asked for input on how to create a national health information network, IBM on Monday announced plans to build a prototype of sorts. By building a test system to move data from one place to another, IBM Research aims to show that easy electronic sharing of […]