Stacy Lawrence

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a Baltimore-based agency, has selected vendors to test the feasibility of allowing covered individuals to access their claims information through personal health records. Capstone Government Solutions, in Nashville, Tenn., and Shared Health, in Chattanooga, Tenn., were chosen to populate PHRs with Medicare beneficiary claims data. Capstone, a joint venture […]

Malaria is the worlds most common parasitic infection, affecting more than 500 million people annually and killing more than 1 million. Those most likely to die as a result of malaria are African children; the disease kills one African child every 30 seconds. In order to help combat malaria, CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear […]

Intel and Eskaton, an elder care non-profit based in California, recently announced that they will begin investigating the best way to bring Internet-based personal health records to the elderly residents of Eskaton facilities. To evaluate the usefulness of Internet-based health files, Eskaton is starting a pilot program with some of its residents who volunteered to […]

Electronic medical records are often viewed as little more than electronic filing systems, but they are increasingly being used to research the way physicians diagnose and treat their patients, as well as patient health outcomes. PPRNet (Practice Partner Research Network) is partnering with MUSC (the Medical University of South Carolina) for the $1.6 million, four-year […]

Expected to help manage every health crisis, from pandemics to chronic diseases, a new program is working to help public health departments prepare reliable IT systems to meet these challenges. Currently, information systems for state and local public health department are developed by individual state and local departments so they may not function very effectively […]

The World Community Grid, founded at the end of 2004 by IBM for nonprofit research projects in the name of the public good, recently announced that one of its two major research projects focusing on human proteome folding has been launched into its second phase. The project, which began at the Institute for Systems Biology […]

A consortium to encourage connected personal health technologies dubbed the Continua Health Alliance was announced recently. The industry group intends to establish an environment conducive to the development of networked personal health and fitness products and services. A wide range of devices are targeted for connection to health care providers, including everything from the bathroom […]

RFID was already supposed to be used to track prescription drugs in the United States, ensuring that counterfeit products are screened out. But the industry is way behind on adoption, and the Food and Drug Administration is expected to come out soon with a new, more vigorous RFID mandate. In June, the Food and Drug […]

IT giant IBM has recently helped to bring a series of tech-savvy medical devices to market, including a remote pacemaker monitor and programmer approved by the FDA in April. In a series of recent partnerships, IBM has become increasingly focused on the integration of IT into medical devices. These innovations are intended to improve patient […]

Small companies continue to offer the best health IT products, according to awards recently given at the 22nd annual Towards the Electronic Patient Record conference in Baltimore. More than 200 leading vendors of electronic health records and related IT showcased their products at the conference. /zimages/2/28571.gifTo read about products recognized at TEPR in previous years, […]

Over the last few months, a number of major international grid computing collaborations have been working to uncover more effective treatments for avian flu. Scientists are focusing on a particular research target in the strain of avian flu known as H5N1. In April in the United States, The Rothberg Institute for Childhood diseases released the […]

With massive quantities of highly sensitive information making its way through a number of different companies, business units and regulatory agencies, biopharmaceutical companies need a very high bar for the digital identification of individuals and the verification of signatures. Recently, the SAFE-BioPharma Association, an industry initiative launched in 2005 and sponsored by the Pharmaceutical Research […]