M.L. Baker

A small raft of health care payers and their partners have launched new campaigns to encourage physicians to write electronic prescriptions. This time, they are offering support along with free equipment, software and other incentives. On Friday, a collaborative of three automakers sent letters to over 6,000 physicians asking them to participate in a new […]

Most health care providers are mostly compliant with the privacy rule of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, but fewer than half of them are fully compliant, according to a survey released Monday by the American Health Information Management Association. The deadline for compliance passed about two years ago. At a public teleconference Wednesday, […]

Health care payers and providers have two weeks until security rules protecting electronic health information kick in. Accordingly, trade and government groups have released an array of tools to help them make sure they are complying with the law. The deadline of April 20 is set by HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and […]

Californias new online registry for organ donors has already signed up more people than expected. As of Friday morning, more than 17,500 people had registered, easily beating the goal of 15,000 hoped for by the end of the week. After plans for the registry were stymied by state budget shortfalls, the four federally designated organ- […]

In a move that drew praise from the nations health IT czar Monday, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts has promised $50 million to implement electronic health records so data can be shared among nursing homes, hospitals and outpatient clinics in three communities in the state. The pledge is one of the largest investments, if […]

Eclipsys Corp. Thursday launched Sunrise 4.0XA, the latest release of its suite of clinical information technology applications, with more than 450 new features in 16 functional areas. John Gomez, the companys chief technology officer, said the new rollout includes faster and more powerful physician documentation, allowing orders for drugs and procedures to be linked and […]

U.S. physicians are five times as likely as general consumers to use handheld computers, but less than a third of physicians who have mobile electronic medical records actually use them. Thats the conclusion of a new report by Forrester Research that surveyed 1,331 physicians. Fifty-seven percent of surveyed doctors reported using some sort of handheld […]

Software vendors are loudly criticizing a recent study showing that hospital computer systems can help physicians make mistakes while ordering medicines. Advocates of CPOE (computerized physician order entry) complain that the study points out flaws in an old computer system at a single hospital and does not compare the errors that the system facilitates to […]

Computerized systems that reduce certain medication errors increase the risk of others, concludes a study published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. CPOE (computerized physician order entry) is widely hailed as an important solution for reducing medical errors. However, the study, led by Ross Koppel at the University of Pennsylvania, listed over […]

Yes, the Human Genome Project is impressive, but our self-centered fixation is causing us to overlook genetic work that could be just as important—and yield rewards far sooner. The top 50 human pathogens have all been sequenced. Malaria, tuberculosis, typhus and your ilk, weve got your number. Actually, better yet, weve got your genomes. Those […]

The National Health IT Coordinator told a group of industry executives that they must come up with a set of standards to make EHRs (electronic health records) interoperable, and hinted that failure to do so could result in government regulation. “Interoperability must be addressed now, or else widespread adoption of stand-alone EHRs will be a […]

WASHINGTON—Biosensors evoke images of tiny chips and wireless technology, but the next generation of biosensors may be something strikingly more familiar: holograms. Holograms cost only fractions of a cent, and the technology could usher in an era of “smart labels” that show when food is spoiled or when body glucose and alcohol levels are too […]