Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

Concern about the livestock industry's overuse of antibiotics has led a number of health care institutions to start choosing meat from animals raised without antibiotics whenever they can. According to Practice Greenhealth, a nonprofit that's helping the health care industry on this issue, more than 400 U.S. hospitals are working toward a goal of making 20 percent of their meat purchases "antibiotic-free." And around a dozen hospitals have already switched the majority of their chicken purchases to "antibiotic-free." And around a dozen hospitals have already switched the majority of their chicken purchases to antibiotic-free.

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Dr. Farzad Mostashari, the national health IT coordinator, said that agencies in the Health and Human Services Department will work closely to craft a surveillance and action plan to keep patients safer through health IT, and it will be done sooner than called for by the Institute of Medicine. Read More »

The federal government and stakeholders interested in device innovation and evaluation should support the creation of a comprehensive partnership on medical devices to monitor the products' performance after they become commercially available, a Food and Drug Administration-initiated and independent national group of experts is recommending in a report. The recommendations call for a master network of data in each clinical area where devices are used. Information on medical devices does exist — in registries, electronic health records (EHR) and claims data — but the disparate locations make it difficult for regulators, doctors and patients to understand and use it efficiently. Yet millions of patients undergo surgery each year and require some type of medical device during the procedure.

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The faster a hospital responds to a product safety alert or recall, the safer its patients are. But with dozens of alerts and recalls issued every week by FDA, manufacturers, and other organizations, how can busy hospital staff quickly see which ones have the potential to affect their own patients?Today, ECRI Institute announces the release of Automatch™ for Equipment, the newest enhancement to its Alerts Tracker™ automated recall management solution used by hospitals and health systems worldwide...

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After the National Institutes of Health grew interested in bioinformatics, following breakthroughts in the 1990s, the National Centers for Biomedical Computing were created with the goal of advancing the field by a few leaps and bounds, because IT systems hadn’t quite caught up to molecular biology. Read More »

This year I've spent a lot of time in doctor's offices and I see what a giant mess the electronic health records (EHR) industry really is. And I don't think Apple's going to solve the problems facing the American healthcare industry...

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