The Department of Veterans Affairs has spent proportionally more than the private sector on health IT and has achieved higher levels of IT adoption and quality of care as a result.

Those were the key conclusions reached in a comparative study undertaken by researchers from the Center for Information Technology Leadership and published in the April issue of Health Affairs, a healthcare policy journal. CITL is part of the Boston-based, nonprofit Partners HealthCare System. Read More »

The State Department's Office of eDiplomacy hosted a conference Friday that sought to connect technology innovators with those interested in "diplomacy and development to enable 21st century statecraft." More than 300 people from federal agencies and the private sector attended Tech@State, held at the agency's Harry S. Truman Building in Washington. The focus was on open source software.

A few noteworthy items from the conference: Read More »

Silver Hill Hospital of New Canaan, Connecticut, recently joined a select group of psychiatric hospitals in the United States that have implemented an electronic health record (EHR) system. Founded in 1931, Silver Hill Hospital is a 129-bed not-for-profit psychiatric hospital that provides inpatient and residential transitional living programs for adolescents and adults. Silver Hill brings particular expertise to the treatment of patients with dual psychiatric and substance use disorder diagnoses. Read More »

The U.S. health care system faces challenges on multiple fronts, including rising costs and inconsistent quality. Health information technology, especially electronic health records, has the potential to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of health care providers. Methods to speed the adoption of health information technology have received bipartisan support among U.S. policymakers, and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 has made the promotion of a national, interoperable health information system a priority. Read More »

Kenneth W. Kizer, one of the nation’s pre-eminent authorities on public health and health care quality improvement, has been named the director of the new Institute for Population Health Improvement (IPHI) at UC Davis Health System, and a Target of Excellence professor at the School of Medicine and the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing. Read More »

The government’s lofty vision of bringing health care into the computer age to improve care and curb costs will come to nothing, unless some mundane technical problems can be solved.

A basic challenge is for doctors, hospitals, patients and public health authorities to be able to easily and securely share information — things like a person’s vital signs, diagnosis, lab tests and drugs prescribed. A fancy electronic patient record, unconnected, is just an expensive way to capture data. Read More »

Yesterday marked another milestone on the Nation’s journey to better health care through the use of electronic health records and health information technology. Two pilot projects were launched—one in Minnesota and the other in Rhode Island—for easily and securely transmitting personal health information via the Internet. Read More »

A new model for developing cures is winning battles in the war against disease in laboratories, clinics and research centers around the world. The hallmarks of this movement are collaboration and the sharing of intellectual property in a wide-open manner that cuts against the grain of traditional for-profit drug discovery. Read More »

As part of our work on the MobiWebApp project, we are to build a standardization roadmap, taking into account the needs from the market, and more specifically from SMEs. 

While we have several ongoing actions toward that goal, we are also proposing to conduct simple interviews from SMEs that are using or are considering to use Web technologies to develop and deploy their mobile applications.

We are starting this series with an interview of Manrique Lopez de la Fuente who is a passionate advocate of Web technologies in the company he works for, Andago.