A patient's best interests may not be motivating emergency room doctors to order tests as much as self-protection from medical liability lawsuits, a new survey from the American College of Emergency Physicians finds. Read More »

EMRs keep on proving their mettle in the area of care coordination.The latest evidence comes from Kaiser Permanente Colorado, which improved outcomes by mining its EMR and electronic disease registries to match patients with heart disease to clinical pharmacy specialists and "personalized" nurses. Read More »

The department is spending more than it needs to on health IT systems and could reduce overlap to save money, the U.S. comptroller said. Read More »

The Defense and Veterans Affairs departments have selected a key component of the their joint electronic health record -- the graphical user interface, which clinicians will use to access records and radiological imagery, Roger Baker, VA's chief information officer, told a press briefing Friday. Read More »

Coming on the heels of news that the patient monitoring system market will reach $9.3 billion in 2014, IBM has announced it's expanding its Health Analytics Solution Center in Dallas. Company officials say teams there are working to help physicians connect smart phones, tablets and other devices to electronic medical records, while also helping healthcare providers build new solutions for remote patient monitoring. Read More »

The first incentive payments from Medicare officially rolled out to physicians and hospitals last week to those successfully demonstrating Meaningful Use of electronic health records during Stage 1. Read More »

The Guardian has published a very curious piece today, entitled: “A Call for Caution on Open Source”. Read More »

A new bill aims to hold the federal government responsible for making sure an estimated 720,000 New York veterans get the benefits they’re entitled to receive. Read More »

In the context of the 2006-2012 Action Plan on Climate Change of the Government of Quebec, a real-time, integrated system for the surveillance and monitoring of extreme heat events has been implemented, within a more general approach dealing with all types of extreme meteorological events. Read More »

Jamie Love sez, “Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has introduced legislation in the US Senate that would use prizes to reward medical R&D, and eliminate all drug monopolies. It includes an open source dividend of $4 billion per year.” Read More »