News
I was listening not long ago to All Things Considered, to a story about a new breed of 3D sensor-equipped cameras - artificial eyes, essentially, that can make out shape and form, navigating space and gauging its dimensions.
Watertown, Mass.-based athenahealth, a provider of cloud-based EMRs, announced recently it would acquire San Mateo, Calif.-based Epocrates, a mobile health company known for its point-of-care medical apps. athenahealth will pay about $293 million in cash. It's a match hailed by the executives of both companies, and also by industry analysts, as a smart move for athenahealth.
Interoperability is a lynchpin for health IT advancement, yet it is lacking, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) told the audience at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology 2012 Annual Meeting, Dec. 12 in Washington, DC.
A majority of clinicians at The Mount Sinai Hospital using Epic's Beacon module, an electronic medical record (EMR) system designed specifically for cancer treatment, indicated the system improved patient care quality and safety.
It takes a rare and altruistic person to truly and deeply care about an issue before it directly affects their life. As a journalist, I would like to believe I care that much about what I report. I am obviously immersed in the subject of healthcare IT and have been for more than six years; I find it fascinating.
Healthcare's clinical community should view population health as a frontier for deepening understanding about the nature of disease, providing incisive clues about patient demographics, behavior patterns and physiological makeup. Large group samples hold the potential to unlock mysteries that physicians may not even realize exist, says Jonathan Teich, MD, chief medical information officer for Amsterdam-based Elsevier.
Kaiser Permanente has begun hiring health information technology workers for a new IT campus in Greenwood Village, Colo. Approximately 500 IT staff will be hired in the state by 2015, bringing Kaiser Permanente's total IT presence in Colorado to about 700, officials said.
"The singularity is near," says Ray Kurzweil, author, inventor, futurist and entrepreneur, who announced this past December he would be joining Google as director of engineering, with unlimited resources for researching artificial intelligence.
A new House bill introduced on Dec. 30 that would expand telehealth services in Medicare and Medicaid programs has garnered the support of the American Telemedicine Association.
Mobile health is one of the more transformative developments in healthcare, according to Patricia Abbott, associate professor of nursing at the University of Michigan, School of Nursing, Division of Nursing Business and Health Systems. "The real winners will be the ones who grab on in the front end, and don't wait," she says.