Traditionally, hospitals and physician practices process their billing of services electronically, but maintain paper charts for their patients. Paper charts are gradually becoming a thing of the past. Electronic billing and medication prescribing were the initial steps to bringing this part of healthcare into the 21st century. Read More »

A survey of European cancer researchers undertaken by the European Association for Cancer Research shows a widespread lack of use of caBIG research orientated tools in Europe. The cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) was launched in 2003 by the US National Cancer Institute with the aim of connecting research teams through the use of shared infrastructure and software to collect, anal Read More »

The pressures on our health system are real and continue to build, threatening the sustainability of our health-care system. For example, rates of chronic disease continue to increase, and access and quality challenges continue to be a reality in many parts of the country. Read More »

The title of this article is pure jargon, but does express the issue at hand. An alternative title “The Most Important Health Policy Decision Hidden as an Obscure Health IT Technical Evaluation that You May Never Have Heard of,” would have also been accurate, but is grammatically unsound and too flippant for an important subject. Read More »

The recent conference in Cork on conflict of interest was extremely interesting and will provide the basis for a few posts on this blog – the speakers’ presentation can be seen here. Read More »

If the wealth of a nation is tied to both the quality and the quantity of its people, then modern trends toward cohabiting instead of marrying, easy divorce and fewer children born to couples will have sweeping economic consequences, a new report says. The “long-term fortunes of the modern economy rise and fall with the family,” the Social Trends Institute says in its new report, “The Sust Read More »

Over 80,000 providers, as of July 31 of this year, had registered to participate in the meaningful use program, which is a great start. Read More »

Around the world, there are more aging people and fewer young people to take care of them. A new study about the trend suggests this demographic shift could drag down the global economy. The report is called "The Sustainable Demographic Dividend." Co-author Phillip Longman, a senior research fellow with the New America Foundation, talks to Lynn Neary about the study...

Bristol City Council's open source push has suffered another series of set-backs that point a finger of blame at CESG, the cyber security arm of government intelligence unit GCHQ. Leaders at the local authority claim that the need for CESG security certification of e-mail systems effectively means the council has no choice but to buy Microsoft. Read More »

The electronics and computing arm of GCHQ has begun reforming its accreditations of IT suppliers to prevent CESG becoming an obstacle to the G-Cloud, through which the Cabinet Office intends to introduce a more liberal procurement regime. Read More »