Everyone knows what “mortality” is: a fatal outcome, or in a word, death. Then what is “amenable mortality?” It’s mortality that can be averted by good health care. Read More »

Software tools are yet another new technology competing for the attention of physicians. Medical software is evolving rapidly from a record-keeping tool to a communications system to a source of decision support and plays the role of a medical device or clinical service. Read More »

Verizon is expanding its cloud-based identity-management services for healthcare providers. Verizon Universal Identify Services-Healthcare, founded in November 2010, now supports new identity standards for accessing electronic health records and health information exchanges. In addition, it offers new features for electronic prescribing, including the prescribing of controlled substances... Read More »

When VA went live with its Blue Button download format last year, the goal was to give veterans the ability to download their personal-health information directly from their MyHealtheVet account. A new initiative announced this summer will expand that capability to private health-care records. Read More »

Roger Baker, CIO of the Veterans Affairs Department, has traded in his laptop and is testing the iPad with up to about 200 other VA employees, mostly physicians at its medical facilities. VA will permit employees on Oct. 1 to use Apple’s iPhone and iPad to connect to the department’s network in the course of their jobs. Read More »

...As we know, FDA regulated medical devices are considered safety-critical systems due to their ability to affect patient lives. Given the nature of scrutiny and the requirement to play it safe, most medical device vendors end up choosing proprietary or custom solutions for operating systems, databases, messaging platforms, alarm notification systems, and event logging. Read More »

HEALTHeLINK, Western New York's regional health information organization (RHIO), and a designated Beacon Community for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, is testing out telemedicine for diabetic management in an initiative that could become "a model for the nation," Beacon project director Todd Norris told Healthcare IT News. Read More »

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has launched an effort to increase awareness about what consumers can do to identify and receive higher quality health care. The “Care about Your Care” project is a month-long effort starting Sept. 1 to help consumers become more aware about the uneven quality of care that the U.S. health system delivers. Read More »

...cracks are beginning to appear in the academic publishing oligopoly, thanks to dedicated volunteers like UBC professor Anita Palepu, an internal medicine specialist at St. Paul's Hospital. Read More »

Two years ago in an address to Congress, President Obama declared his commitment to invest in electronic health records (EHRs), saying he thought it was perhaps the best way to quickly improve the quality of American health care. Just two years later, that hunch is proving true in Cleveland, Ohio. Read More »