MEwens
What’s standing in the way of the wider spread of health IT?
Plenty of things, according to a new report from the Bipartisan Policy Center. The report says boosting use of electronic medical records and other health IT “enjoys bipartisan support.” It’s also being pushed by billions of dollars in government incentives.
The assumption is […]
Continued Read ...
MEwens
Electronic prescribing is helping to boost the likelihood that people actually pick up their new medications, as more doctors adopt the new technology.
New research shows that 76.5% of patients pick up their prescriptions at the pharmacy when the doctor e-prescribes, seven percentage points higher than when the old pen-and-pad method is used.
That’s according […]
Continued Read ...
MEwens
The federal government is spending billions to encourage hospitals and doctors to use electronic medical records.
But a report out yesterday from the Institute of Medicine finds that digitized records and other health IT products are expected to improve patient safety — but only when the products are well-designed and correctly used.
“Designed and applied […]
Continued Read ...
MEwens
Google said it would wind down its Google Health personal health record after about three years of operation.
It “didn’t catch on the way we’d hoped,” the company said. Nor did the non-health related Google Power Meter, which will also be unplugged.
The company said it will retire Google Health on Jan. 1, 2012. Its […]
Continued Read ...
MEwens
Melanoma Focus: Two of the as-yet unreleased studies to be highlighted at the upcoming annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology will deal with melanoma drugs — one from Bristol-Myers Squibb and another from Roche and Daiichi Sankyo, Dow Jones Newswires reports. The study of Bristol-Myers’ Yervoy, which was approved by […]
Continued Read ...
Katherine Hobson
With $27 billion in government incentives up for grabs, hospitals and physicians are rushing to switch their older electronic medical record systems to newer ones.
But that change can be tricky, a new study suggests. Researchers found that adopting a more sophisticated system for entering prescription orders led to an overall drop in […]
Continued Read ...
Katherine Hobson
Study’s Reverberations?: Abbott’s Niaspan setback has implications for Merck and Roche, which are also trying to develop drugs that raise good cholesterol and can be added to statins, which lower the bad kind, the WSJ reports. Merck, for example, is conducting a 25,000-person trial to test its own niacin-based drug tredaptive. A […]
Continued Read ...
MEwens
Should electronic medical records be rolled out chiefly according to the needs of physicians and other providers?
That’s the question debated by two physicians in this week’s Annals of Internal Medicine. Anwar Hussain, a physician at UHS Hospitals in Johnson City, NY, argues the affirmative in his commentary.
He writes that the government’s current policy […]
Continued Read ...
MEwens
The reasons for not adopting electronic medical records are pretty straightforward: those on the sidelines think the systems are expensive, that they won’t produce a return on investment and that they’ll cut productivity even after they’re fully implemented.
So finds a new survey, conducted by the Medical Group Management Association and covering 4,588 health-care […]
Continued Read ...
MEwens
Doctors’ views of electronic medical records are not getting any rosier.
According to a 500-physician survey released by athenahealth, which provides online business services to medical groups, and online physician community Sermo, while the overall favorable rating held steady at 77%, more detailed responses showed doctors were more skeptical about digitized records.
The percentage of […]
Continued Read ...
