News

Much anticipated, and sometimes hyped, electronic health record system rollouts cost millions of dollars and often end up causing chaos, frustration, even firings at hospitals across the country. Case in point: Maine Medical Center in Portland, Maine, a 600-bed hospital that is home to the celebrated Barbara Bush Children’s Hospital, and a part of the MaineHealth network. Read More »

As hospitals and doctors scramble to install EHRs to meet government-imposed rules and deadlines, a major concern for many hospitals is cost. Midland Memorial, a 320-bed hospital in Midland, Texas, struggles financially because it treats a high percentage of uninsured patients. It would have been hard for it to pony up more than $20 million to implement an EHR system, and qualify for government incentives. Then, the folks in its IT department came across Medsphere and OpenVistA. Read More »

Healthcare is  complex, complicated, and touches every single individual on this planet. The average spend per capita on healthcare costs is rising tremendously year over year and the governmental focus seems to be on increasing premiums, changing tax rates and focusing completely only on efficiency gains. Read More »

[...As] head-scratching continues about how a famously web-savvy administration could have flubbed its Internet homework so badly, an examination by the Sunlight Foundation shows the administration turned the task of building its futuristic new health care technology planning and programming over to legacy contractors with deep political pockets. Read More »

Cheer up: Despite the gloom, the world truly is becoming a better place. Indeed, 2017 is likely to be the best year in the history of humanity. To explain why, let me start with a story. I’m on my annual win-a-trip journey with a university student, who this year is Aneri Pattani, a newly minted graduate of Northeastern University. One of the people we met is John Brimah, who caught leprosy as a boy...

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Is Google (GOOG) one step closer to becoming Big Brother? The Internet giant is acquiring Nest, a company that makes smart thermostats and smoke alarms, for $3.2 billion in cash. [...] Nest's thermostats were designed to reduce a homeowner's heating costs; the device learns its user's behaviors and can adjust the temperature autonomously. [...] Read More »

U.S. Federal Trade Commission investigators are circulating an internal draft memo that recommends suing Google Inc. (GOOG) for abusing its dominance of Internet search in violation of antitrust laws, three people familiar with the matter said. Read More »