Stacy Lawrence

Shortly after a Kaiser Permanente project supervisor circulated an internal e-mail to more than 180,000 employees denouncing the companys electronic health record system and the alleged financial waste associated with it, Kaisers CIO has resigned. Kaiser Foundation Health Plan has been praised as being advanced of its peers when it comes to rolling out its […]

McKesson has announced that it will acquire Per-Se Technologies for $1.8 billion. McKesson is among the largest health care services companies, and provides supply management and IT for health care providers and insurers. The acquisition of Per-Se is intended to enhance the administrative IT solutions offered by McKesson. It will also expand McKessons client base […]

When merged with regular medication and in-person cognitive stimulation, structured computer-based games can help Alzheimers patients improve their memory, according to a new study. Patients who performed the best were in an adult day care facility and had three weekly sessions of multimedia Internet-based cognitive stimulation over the course of six months, in addition to […]

In an effort to encourage top notch preventative care, a new tool to be downloaded to a PDA or desktop or used online by health care providers was launched by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and announced by Department of Health and Human Services. The tool was announced by Department of Health and […]

Eleven electronic health record products were recently given a seal of approval by the industry group the Certification Committee for Healthcare Information Technology. The certification is the first for ambulatory EHR products and is designed to ensure functionality, interoperability and security standards. To be certified, a product must entirely comply with more than 200 CCHIT […]

The cross-industry group Microsoft formed last spring to better integrate technology into the process of drug development has announced its second research venture—a project intended to simplify the process for identifying and validating genomic biomarkers, which often indicate the likelihood of disease or drug efficacy. The BioIT Alliances first project, a “collaborative molecular environment” in […]

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger committed $240 million to health care IT in California, and a plan is supposed to be in place before the end of 2006. At the start of the coming fray, a major philanthropic group has just weighed in on what Californias health IT priorities should be. Now that Schwarzenegger has committed $240 […]

In a reversal of pay-for-performance in which doctors are paid according to how well they measure on a number of indicators, new state rankings show which payers work the best with physicians. Pay-for-performance has long been hailed as a means of curtailing physician costs and improving patient care. The idea is that with the increasing […]

Hospitals have long tried to adapt existing mobile technology, including tablet computers, laptops, carts with PCs attached and PDAs, to their needs. But Intel has revealed it has a mobile clinical assistant platform—designed for the health care industry—that is now under development. Along with tablet PC maker Mobile Computing, Intel, of Santa Clara, Calif., has […]

A set of data standards developed by HL7, a health IT standards accreditation organization in the United States, is being jointly published with an international data standards group. Seven additional standards have also been submitted for consideration. So far, health IT data standards in the United States have been entirely the purview of industry groups, […]