Technology

Health-care IT seems to be the new issue du jour for Congress. On Sept. 15, Rep. Pete Stark (D-California), the namesake of the anti-kickback medical referral law, unveiled a bill to establish a nationwide health-care IT infrastructure, but the measure faces competition from two other similar bills already under consideration.

Overwhelmed by the number of electronic health record vendors out there? A research and consulting firm offers an in-depth look at 10 of the major vendors for the ambulatory care market and highlights the top performers for features, flexibility and physician satisfaction.

A former orthopedic surgeon has created a company dedicated to helping physicians navigate the choppy waters of purchasing the right electronic health records system - for free.

How do PHRs benefit your practice? We spoke to PHR experts and doctors who are using the systems about the benefits and drawbacks of incorporating them into their practices.

One struggling group practice turned its fortunes around by improving its billing procedures.

From timetables to training, implementing a new system is more about people than computers.

The Google PHR that debuted in May connects to an impressive list of healthcare organizations. But the rival PHR from Microsoft has landed a big fish called Kaiser Permanente.

Only four percent of physicians use a fully functional EHR that satisfies federally promoted certification requirements, while another 14 percent have basic systems.

If you want to better understand why less than 20 percent of doctors have implemented EHRs, visit the website of a vendor called Extormity, dedicated to offering "highly proprietary, difficult to customize and prohibitively expensive" software.

The pace of EHR implementation has been excruciatingly slow.

Here's one more reason why the feds are pushing for a nationwide health information network--the ability to scour millions of electronic records and catch unexpected drug side effects as soon as possible.

A new study from the AC Group identifies seven EHR vendors that give you the most digital bang for your buck.

First, give physicians incentives to adopt EHRs. Then make their use compulsory. It's a game plan from an offshoot of the National Governors Association for promoting digital medicine on a state level.

Two recent studies suggest that many healthcare providers weren't ready when the May 23 deadline came to submit insurance claims with only the new National Provider Identifier. What's at stake is millions if not billions of dollars in rejected claims.

Cue the drum roll-every last one of the 8.7 million enrollees of Kaiser Permanente finally has an outpatient EHR. It’s the latest milestone of a $4 billion IT project that suggests how much it might cost to digitize the entire nation’s healthcare system.

If you want to copy the habits of financially successful doctors who don't have to borrow money to meet payroll, consider implementing an EHR. That's one conclusion you could draw from survey data from the Medical Group Management Association.

The nationwide network of EHRs that the feds are building will include various PHRs on the market, and possibly those from Google and Microsoft.

Certified EHRs are supposed to be the best, and the kind the feds want you to buy, but the number of programs attaining this status has tailed off big-time.

The US healthcare system could save lives if it possessed an early warning system for new drugs with unexpected side effects instead of waiting for complaints to roll into the FDA. Our friends across the Atlantic are developing such a system using EHRs.

Massachusetts lawmakers want to make getting a medical license hinge on a clinician's ability to use an EHR by 2015. Physicians there have mixed feelings about the plan.

Certifying EHRs is supposed to help doctors pick the best products. But small medical practices generally don't put much stock in this stamp of approval, according to KLAS, a firm that researches healthcare information technology.

The case of entertainer Britney Spears and her peeked-at digital chart illustrates the value of an EHR audit trail.

Facial recognition software can speed up logging into your office network and individual programs.

Your choice of EHRs is slowly narrowing down as the number of vendors shrinks. That makes shopping easier.

Take these precautions with Web-based EHRs.

You've got key decisions to make when choosing the right system for your office. Here's help.

Everybody wants to know if their EHR vendor will be around five years from now. Well, the finances of publicly traded vendors are an open book. In the last quarter of 2007, most of them rolled in dough, but one lost money.

Hospitals have a federal green light to help you pay for an EHR, but one little restriction could limit the number of programs eligible for a discount.

You're under growing pressure to e-prescribe, but how do you get started? An interactive website co-sponsored by organized medicine walks you through the steps.

Provider organizations looking to buy an ambulatory electronic health record give the most consideration to products from eClinicalWorks, NextGen Healthcare Information Systems, and Allscripts, according to IT research firm KLAS Enterprises.