IBM has launched a new technology designed to extract relevant clinical information from unstructured data. Based on the same natural language processing technology used in IBM's Watson, its new Content and Predictive Analytics for Healthcare is aimed at preventing patient readmissions. Read More »

Remember the federal government's "cloud first" policy? Read More »

Spending on hospital care grew the fastest of all healthcare expenditures over the past year, according to a new report from Altarum Health.

Hospital spending increased 6.4 percent between August 2010 and August 2011, compared to slightly more than 5 percent for prescription drugs, 4 percent for nursing homes, and slightly more than 2 percent for home healthcare. Read More »

As developers, we are not satisfied with "the program runs in my computer," nor the lazy "it works for me"explanation. We demand that the program must be tested in different computers, by different people. We expect the code to include tests, and the tests to have been run by many different people. Only then do we trust the code. Read More »

Cable Green, director of learning at Creative Commons, gave the final morning's opening keynote at the 2011 Open Education Conference on the seeming obviousness of open policy as a necessity for education. "I'm interested in the policies that prevent us from providing an education to anyone in the world who might want one," Green said. Read More »

In the previous issue of Bio•IT World (July/August 2011), my fellow columnist Ernie Bush posed the question, what are the limits to collaboration among pharmaceutical companies? This same question was faced by the telecommunications industry in 1913, albeit during an era of ascendancy and not senescence. This led to a solution that lasted 70 years. Could history repeat itself? Read More »

Hospital administrators are leading the use of health care analytics for a range of functions in provider settings. Driving their increased use are a few key clinical and business factors: the desire to meet meaningful use requirements, create quality reports, and better capture revenue, according to the results of SearchHealthIT.com's business intelligence survey. Read More »

The Veterans Affairs Department plans to field up to 100,000 tablet computers, the largest such deployment in the government, VA disclosed last week in a request to industry for technical help. The department has developed a work around for federal wireless security standards that supports the devices' management in a vendor-operated cloud computing environment, according to the request. Read More »

In one of the largest moves to mobile devices by a civilian agency, the Veterans Affairs Department plans to procure up to 100,000 tablet computers, the agency recently announced. Read More »

In a time where budgets are flat or declining, Roger Baker, the chief information officer at the Veterans Affairs Department, says giving the agency chief information officers more say in financial decisions could be a way to create savings for the federal technology enterprise. Read More »