M.L. Baker

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 […]

WASHINGTON—At a panel about how information access could improve health care, Carol Kovac, general manager of IBM Healthcare, repeated a joke: “The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to chose from,” she said. The point is that health care IT has a surfeit of standards, and many of them overlap and […]

WASHINGTON—Health researchers are rewarded for hoarding data as opposed to sharing it, concluded experts on a panel on intellectual property and information access in the genetic age. The panel was part of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences larger conference, which explores how scientific issues impact society, here this week. Alan Herbert, a […]

President Bushs science advisor and a prominent Democratic Member of Congress sparred publicly this week about the administrations stance on computer models. Representative Henry Waxman accused the administration of invoking scientific uncertainty to discredit evidence counter to its policies. John Marburger, science advisor to the president, responded that the computer models used to make predictions […]

In a recent column, I wrote about my experiences using a series of different Web tools to find the most important advances in brain-machine interfaces. I concluded that the single best resource was not electronic at all, but rather a phone call to a flesh-and-blood expert. In response, a few people e-mailed me with tips […]