Technology

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is providing $9.2 million in federal matching funds to Medicaid programs in four states to enable the programs to implement electronic health records.

The use of home use medical devices will ramp up as telehealth takes off, according to a report from British medical research company InMedica.

Healthcare reform can "catalyze healthcare innovation that improves quality and reduces cost, if only investors, policy-makers, and companies rise to the challenge before us," according to a new report by healthcare venture capital firm Psilos Group.

The non-profit National Quality Forum has formed the Health Information Technology Advisory Committee (HITAC) to guide its ongoing work in health information technology.

One in five consumers rated their interest in accessing personal health records through a secure Internet connection as high, said they would switch physicians to obtain access, and indicated that they would be very likely to use a mobile communication device to access them, according to the third annual Deloitte Center for Health Solutions Survey of Health Care Consumers.

Electronic health record systems can help medical practices improve their design and payment structures, according to one doctor?s examination of his five-physician internal medicine practice, published in the April 29 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Citizen satisfaction with government Web sites, which climbed to an all-time high last year, remained high through the first quarter of 2010, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index?s E-Government Satisfaction Index.

Physician practices are considering an ever-increasing number of software vendors when it comes to choosing an electronic health record, according to a new report from KLAS, a research firm specializing in monitoring and reporting the performance of healthcare vendors.

The health information exchange infrastructure will change dramatically over the next two years, according to the new report from IDC Health Insights.

To achieve meaningful use of health information technology, physician practices must increase the use of quality measurement as part of their electronic health records systems, according to a paper recently released by the American College of Physicians.

Community Care Physicians, a multi-specialty group in Albany, N.Y., recognizes the value of integrating primary care with technology.

Physician practices large and small are being herded into the panacea of the electronic health record. However, why do we tolerate a physician "texting" when he or she is examining a patient?

Do you tweet? Do your patients? Social networking via Twitter and other means could be a way to disseminate correct information and improve behavior related to the use of antibiotics, but it also might lead to confusion or the sharing of inaccurate information, contend the authors of research recently published in the American Journal of Infection Control.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has launched a new online tool that highlights and compares national, regional, state, and local community data on the use of preventive services among adults aged 50 to 64 years in an effort to help healthcare professionals and others increase knowledge and use of preventive care services.

Regional health information organizations must provide leadership and financial incentives if more comprehensive, community-wide use of health information exchange is to occur, according to research recently published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Physicians who practice at facilities at which electronic health record systems are used have a high prevalence of computer-associated upper extremity musculoskeletal symptoms, according to research recently published in Archives of Internal Medicine.

Americans remain concerned about the privacy of their medical records, according to the results of a new study released by the California HealthCare Foundation.

Home telemonitoring plus active medication management by a nurse practitioner resulted in greater reductions in A1C than did a monthly care coordination telephone call in patients with type 2 diabetes in a study reported in the March issue of Diabetes Care.

Your patients with chronic disease may use the Internet less than your other patients and also may remain more strongly connected to you and other offline sources of medical assistance, including friends, family, and books, compared with your other patients.

A new white paper released by the Department of Health and Human Services? Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology highlights five options and recommends additional research in relation to consumer consent possibilities for electronic health information exchange.

Remote monitoring reduced the median time to clinical decision compared with standard in-office follow-up for patients with cardiac resynchronization therapy defibrillators or implantable cardioverter-defibrillators, according to results of the prospective Clinical Evaluation of Remote Notification to Reduce Time to Clinical Decision trial recently released during the American College of Cardiology annual meeting.

The United States ranks in the bottom half among comparable countries in almost every metric used to measure the adoption of health information technology, according to the National Broadband Plan recently delivered to Congress by the Federal Communications Commission.

The physician leader of a growing ob-gyn practice reported that electronic health records have become a mandatory recruiting tool to land physicians out of residency.

The state of Louisiana has launched a new website, www.healthfinderla.gov, in an effort to give residents easy access to detailed, accurate information on how to live more healthful lives.

The use of at-home medical devices to connect doctors and patients via the Internet can help patients and their physicians work together more efficiently to manage some chronic conditions, according to results of a pilot project that paired the Cleveland Clinic?s electronic health records (EHR) system with Microsoft?s online HealthVault service.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has awarded more than $2.4 million to five grantee teams to test whether and how information?such as the stress levels of caregivers of premature infants and medication-taking routines of senior citizens at risk of cognitive decline ? can be collected, interpreted, and acted on by clinicians and patients in real-world clinical settings.

Twenty-five percent of all office-based prescribers now use electronic prescribing, according to a new report by e-prescribing network Surescripts.

The electronic health record adoption rate in medical offices has climbed 3.2 percent since last year to 36.1 percent.

The HITECH Act was swept into law as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. It affects many aspects of your HIPAA compliance and means increased enforcement and harsher penalties for violators. Here's what you need to know.

It's critical that developers or purchasers of electronic medical records systems consider more than billing function.