The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs health care system has become one of the best anywhere, partly because of a big change made in mid-1990s, the director of the Tomah VA Medical Center said Tuesday.

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This article examines the potential role of health IT in addressing healthcare disparities among racial and ethnic minority populations. An overview of health IT utilization among healthcare providers notes certain characteristics that may disproportionately affect minority populations.

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An emerging body area network (BAN) technology is gearing up to compete with Bluetooth Low Energy across a broad range of medical and consumer applications. The competition comes as medical devices are increasingly adopting a growing set of wireless network technologies including Wi-Fi and Zigbee.

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While open source is already widespread throughout the government, its adoption by the White House will almost certainly give permission for much wider uptake.  Particularly telling are the reasons that the White House made the switch.

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There's a law requiring providers of federal funded drug and alcohol treatment services to obtain a patient's consent before disclosing their medical records to another provider or to a health information exchange. Does your electronic health record enable you to segregate those records, store those patient consent directives and remind you that you need to obtain patient consent to move patient-constrained medical information?

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Twelve years ago, the Institute of Medicine issued a landmark report showing that medical errors in U.S hospitals kill up to 98,000 Americans a year. People responded to the alarm. Task forces were convened. Congressional investigations launched. Op-eds written. Yet as hard as it may be to believe, American medicine is, if anything, even more dangerous today. In this groundbreaking Washington Monthly article, investigative journalist Marshall Allen documents how contact with the U.S. health care system has become a leading cause of death in the United States and proposes solutions.

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Two key chronic and wide-spread health care conditions – cardiac disease and diabetes care – are prime contenders to evolve existing technologies into wireless-enabled devices. Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of deaths globally. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 17.5 million people died from cardiovascular disease in 2005, or about 30% of all global deaths. In this Huffington Post article, ”The Disease that Will Affect Half the Nation by 2020,” Andrea Pennington points out that diabetes, though not as lethal, affects 27 million people in the United States today and is predicted to affect 50% of Americans by 2020. 

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The emergence of new, low-cost devices – such as briefcase-sized ultrasound scanners and cell phone-sized monitors for vital signs – are giving the medical profession greater power to deliver better, most cost-effective patient care from virtually any location.

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MDR-TB is a highly preventable illness, making it one of the most logical targets for TB intervention. Proactive reduction of drug resistance requires increased adherence to treatment regimens and uninterrupted access to first-line drugs. Texts for TB aims to address these two concerns simultaneously with mobile technology

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Any driver knows the dangers of texting. Yet this practice has become commonplace. Dr. Robin Landa recently challenged students to design an ad campaign about the dangers of texting and driving....  But texting can also save lives, even for the illiterate. Let me explain.

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