Canadian healthcare may be ready to go mobile. Canada Health Infoway, the national government's electronic health record development organization, will invest $45 million to create "consumer health solutions" to allow patients to access their EHR records through mobile devices like smartphones. Read More »

Two years ago, the Ethio American Health Center opened its doors in the nation’s capital, promising the country’s largest community of Ethiopian immigrants a place where doctors spoke their language and understood their culture.

Many of the community’s poorest quickly flocked to the center. But for all the specialized services the center offers patients, there’s one area where it’s fallen short: moving from paper files to electronic health records. They don’t even have a website.

“It would be great, but we can’t afford it,” said Dawit Gizaw, the center’s administrator. Read More »

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) now allows patients access to their medical records, but few patients...have ever lain eyes on their records. And those who try commonly face bureaucratic obstacles and exorbitant copying fees.

One doctor thought that openly inviting patients to review these records could better engage patients, and increase their understanding of health and treatment regimens. So he decided to find out for sure.

The news (see http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.d196) that several publishers have withdrawn access to health journals from the academic communities in Bangladesh has come as a wake-up call about the limitations of the HINARI programme. Many on the HIFA-2015 (Healthcare Information For All by 2015)  forum feel this annoucement is a disaster, and that the only way to resolve the situation is to launch a concerted effort to restore journal access to those in Bangladesh. Read More »

In his State of the Union speech, President Obama cited computer chips and the Internet as examples of technologies that were originally funded by the government, and later unleashed new industries.  Read More »

Long before open source entered the lexicon, the Veterans Administration (VA) was known to techies for VistA, an electronic medical record (EMR) program written in MUMPS that was developed in an open way and published as a public record, freely available.

Now, with MUMPS experts looking increasingly like an opera audience (aging out), the VA is looking to replace VistA. They like the idea of open source, but they have serious questions about things like governance and management of the intellectual property. Read More »

The Best And Worst In Federal IT, 2010 Edition.  NextGov (12/30, Sternstein) asked, “What were the best federal IT initiatives of 2010? Read More »

Veteran IT watchers who caught the webcast of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee last week saw something all too familiar. Read More »

In the 2010s, what’s the latest tool for recruiting the best clinicians to your hospital? Is it the professional pride of being associated with an organization that provides the best care in the region? Is it showing respect for the growing number of clinicians who seek to work hard but protect their personal lives from excessive intrusions in the form of frequent on-call duty or mandatory overtime? Read More »