Steve Spohn is wheelchair-bound, on a ventilator and can barely move because of muscular dystrophy, but he's still able to play video games. He participated in last week's Games for Health conference in Boston, where the AbleGamers Foundation hosted the Hardware Hackers Challenge, a contest to build a handicap-accessible game controller in under two hours.
It's been 19 years since the prestigious Institute of Medicine urged greater adoption of computer systems in healthcare, and more than six years since then-President George W. Bush declared, "By computerizing health records, we can avoid dangerous medical mistakes, reduce costs and improve care."
Over the next two years, 58% of small physician practices plan to roll out electronic health records. And by 2014, the federal government wants more than half of all healthcare facilities to use EHRs.
Intel and GE will combine health-IT assets to form a company that focuses on providing medical care technologies to the elderly and people with chronic illnesses, the companies announced on Monday.
As part of its effort to encourage widespread adoption of electronic health records (EHR) systems, the federal government has eased the requirements that health care providers must meet if they want to receive reimbursements for such projects. The new criteria for demonstrating so-called meaningful use of electronic records are spelled out in the final Phase 1 EHR implementation guidelines that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued earlier this month. The 864-page document was finalized a
Lawson Software will soon release a specialized analytics application for health care organizations, which make up a significant portion of the ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendor's customer base.
Health IT providers Allscripts-Misys Healthcare Solutions and Eclipsys plan to merge in an all-stock deal worth US$1.3 billion [b], with the companies focused on creating a universally accepted electronic health record, they announced Wednesday.
Mike McGill, program director for Internet2's Health Sciences Initiative, talked with Network World about how he believes gigabit-speed networks and telemedicine applications such as telepathology, telesurgery and telepsychiatry can transform the healthcare industry.
Two conservative organizations, a physicians' group and a social policy think tank, are suing the Obama administration for privacy and free speech violations over a recent attempt to get people to e-mail the White House about any "fishy" misinformation they hear regarding health-care reform.
The University of California at Berkeley Friday disclosed that hackers broke into restricted computer databases in the campus health-services center, as the university began notifying current and former Berkeley students their personal information may have been taken.
Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, demonstrated some applications on Thursday that apply current technologies to problems facing the health care industry.
As CIO and senior vice president of innovation, technology and service operations for Aetna, Meg McCarthy's responsibilities extend beyond IT. Her employer is a leader in the U.S. health insurance and benefits industry, with more than 34,000 employees and $35 billion in revenue. In addition to her tech duties, McCarthy oversees real estate, procurement and service; leads the informatics group; and runs ActiveHealth, an Aetna subsidiary in New York.
Editor's note: This is Part 1 of a two-part look at the ongoing efforts to roll out electronic health records in the U.S. Part 2 will be posted online tomorrow.
Toronto-based Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre is in the final stage of a long-term strategy to digitize patient records, having just begun to implement an enterprise content management (ECM) system.
Health-care providers looking to implement a mobile strategy need to understand the strong bond people have with their smartphones, said panelists Friday at the World Congress' Summit on mHealth in Boston.
Smartphones, tablet PCs and other wireless devices are poised to play a greater role in health care as doctors and patients embrace the mobile Internet, panelists at a mobile health technology conference in Boston said Thursday.
A lack of electronic medical data from doctors, complicated setup processes and the static nature of personal health records (PHRs) have caused U.S. consumers to shun the products. But PHR use should increase as more doctors use electronic health records (EHRs) and tech vendors develop offerings that are easier to use.
A recent snapshot by research firm IDC Canada Ltd. of the e-health landscape in Canada reveals a market that is still very much fragmented and immature.
Microsoft is researching how gadgets like the company's Xbox game machine, surface computers and accelerometers in mobile phones could be used to improve health care.
Microsoft has purchased software from Merck & Co. to make its Amalga data-aggregation and management software more useful to life sciences and pharmaceutical researchers, the company said Monday.
Penn Medicine is currently in the midst of developing the Penn Data Store, a data warehouse and series of individual dashboards, to serve its clinicians and researchers. The CTO shares the eight steps this health care organization uses to develop the dashboards.