With the disability claims backlog debacle at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs spiraling out of control, outcry for the situation is reaching a fever pitch. Case in point, 67 U.S. senators on Monday sent a letter to President Obama calling for him to be more directly involved in the situation. Read More »

Robert Reedy was bored by his IT job. After 17 years encompassing various straight IT roles, spanning break-fix to networking, he needed a change. Reedy considered going back to school for nursing, until he found about ONC’s HIT Workforce Development Program, that is. Read More »

By now, if you read MSM or conservative web sites, you’ve probably heard that a new randomized study of Medicaid in Oregon (published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine) shows the program has no impact on the health of people receiving it, which, some say, means the program is a worthless waste of money, or that its expansion via Obamacare should be resisted. Read More »

The Direct standard, which enables participants to send authenticated and encrypted health data directly to trusted recipients online, could help to accelerate health information exchange efforts, according to a pair of consumer coalitions. Read More »

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT is shoring up health information exchange efforts with the long-awaited release of the "Governance Framework for Trusted Electronic Health Information Exchange." The agency says the framework will provide a "common foundation" for all types of HIE governance models. Read More »

A pioneering mobile device using cutting-edge nanotechnology to rapidly detect malaria infection and drug resistance will be ready for field testing this year, one year ahead of schedule. Read More »

The Air Force, which has been rocked by a sexual abuse scandal at its major training base, suffered another embarrassment Monday with the revelation that its chief sexual assault prevention officer was arrested over the weekend for allegedly groping a woman. Read More »

The new darling of the online educational community is Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The example which figures most prominently in the popular imagination is the Khan Academy, though its founder says otherwise, noting that MOOCs are merely online transplantations of traditional courses, while Khan Academy offers something different. Read More »

A European Union-funded mHealth project to develop a mobile device using nanotechnology to rapidly detect malaria infection and drug resistance will be ready for field testing in 2013--a year ahead of schedule--according to a university announcement. Read More »

Health IT has failed to live up to its promise so far, largely because it's not interconnected or easy to use, and because providers have not made changes in the way they deliver healthcare services to reap its benefits, according to Arthur Kellerman, M.D., a policy analyst with RAND Corp., who writes in this month's Health Affairs. Read More »