Information technology management issues that caused the Veterans Affairs Department to spend $127 million on a failed outpatient scheduling application could harm a second attempt to create such a system. Read More »

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT plans to develop a clearer set of technical descriptions for establishing the standard clinical document formats for exchanging summary information as patients move across settings of care.ONC will also consolidate into a consistent template-based guide the advice offered by multiple organizations for implementing the standard document formats used to share data about patients’ medications and problems. Read More »

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT will focus in 2011 on activities that will enable healthcare providers to perform complex exchanges of information and on the technical foundation to support secure sharing.

ONC is considering a set of tasks it needs to undertake “in short order” to make it possible for stage 2 of meaningful use to have a more robust exchange of information, said Dr. David Blumenthal, national health IT coordinator, at the Jan. 12 meeting of the advisory Health IT Standards Committee .

Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, talked on the panel about his work on a White House panel that delivered a report on health care IT. "Eighty percent of doctors have no IT systems at all in their offices, and even large providers have closed system that are not interoperable," Schmidt said.

The report called for the Administration to adopt a series of interoperability standards such as using metadata tagging. "Government is going to force a disaggregated industry to become interoperable," he said. Read More »

[Guam's] only civilian hospital could qualify for millions in federal subsidies if it successfully implements electronic health records systems.  According to Norman Okamura, faculty member of the Social Science Research Institute at the University of Hawaii, about $19 billion is set aside in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to build health information technology systems nationwide. Read More »

Over the past few years, I’ve posted many blogs about the importance of transport standards. Once a transport standard is widely adopted, content will seamlessly flow per Metcalfe’s law. We already have good content standards from X12, HL7, ASTM, and NCPDP. We already have good vocabulary standards from NLM, Regenstrief, IHTSDO and others. We have the beginnings of transport standards from CAQH, IHE, and W3C. We have the work of the NHIN Direct Project (now called the Direct Project). Read More »

A $21.7 billion development fund backed by celebrities and hailed as an alternative to the bureaucracy of the United Nations sees as much as two-thirds of some grants eaten up by corruption, The Associated Press has learned.

Much of the money is accounted for with forged documents or improper bookkeeping, indicating it was pocketed, investigators for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria say. Donated prescription drugs wind up being sold on the black market. Read More »

 Just as the right medical treatment is critical to a patient's health, the right approach to selecting and adopting an electronic health records system is critical to the health, and even survival, of a physician's practice. And it's not just about the technology. Read More »

Until Larry Scott of Vancouver conceived the notion of becoming an online watchdog, military veterans who were struggling to navigate their claims with the Department of Veterans Affairs had few places to turn. Read More »

What does 2011 hold for the field of robotics? Plenty, if 2010 is any indication. This will not be the year that mobile, artificially intelligent robot nurses assume the responsibility of caring for the world's growing elderly population, but it does promise to be a pivotal time for the development of the underlying technology that will enable safe and reliable automated elder care, not to mention other services that robots are expected to perform in the coming decade. Read More »