Brian T. Horowitz

Tablets will be a fixture in many doctors’ offices in 2012, research firm NPD Group reports. About 75 percent of small and midsize medical practices plan to buy tablets over the next year, according to a recent survey by the company. The results were part of NPD’s third-quarter “SMB Technology Monitor.” Released Dec. 29, the […]

Nuance Communications has launched the 2012 Mobile Clinician Voice Challenge, a contest to get developers to integrate speech recognition into mobile or Web-based health care applications. The company is calling on independent software vendors, internal development teams and health insurance providers to find new ways to incorporate speech recognition into their medical software. Nuance announced […]

The Department of Veterans Affairs has launched an initiative to replace the medical-scheduling component of its electronic health record platform and is requesting proposals for how to update and rebuild the application. The Medical Scheduling Package (MSP) is part of the VA’s Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) EHR platform. VistA manages the […]

Motorola Admiral Android Smartphone This Motorola Android 2.3 phone on Sprint’s network features push-to-talk features for first responders, along with scratch-resistant Corning Gorilla glass. The phone can withstand dust, shock and solar radiation. Xplore Xtreme Tablet Announced in May, the line of Xplore Xtreme Tablets can withstand abuse, whether it’s being left in a fish […]

Users can now access personal medical information from Microsoft’s HealthVault personal health record platform through a new Windows Phone 7 application. HealthVault allows patients to manage chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension, as well as keep track of medication schedules and fitness goals. They can also retrieve their health histories and lab test results […]

Although Hewlett-Packard announced that the TouchPad tablet will soon meet its demise, it still has a job at California’s Stanford University, where researchers are using the device to control a Magnetic Resonance Imaging scanner. MRIs collect detailed 3-D images of the body without the radiation exposure levels of X-rays. The procedures are now being used […]

With all of the unstructured data in medical journals, doctors’ notes, radiology images and faxes, IT vendors have been developing technology to help the health care industry make sense of all the loose data. In 2012, vendors will continue to develop cloud databases and supercomputers such as IBM Watson to store and process large volumes […]

The next assignment for IBM’s Watson supercomputer is to evaluate treatments for cancer. Health insurer WellPoint, which is looking into real-life applications for Watson, has announced that a leading cancer institution in Los Angeles, Cedars-Sinai’s Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute, will provide expertise to the company on developing applications based on IBM’s Watson data-analytics machine. […]

A Florida doctor has invented a way to monitor patient pacemakers and defibrillators remotely from an Apple iPad in real time. Dr. E. Martin Kloosterman, director of the electrophysiology laboratory and chief of the cardiology department at Boca Raton Regional Hospital in Florida, developed the Remote-K-viewer to allow doctors to see direct readings from pacemakers […]

CDW Healthcare has inked a deal with the California Health Information Partnership and Services Organization (CalHIPSO) to provide the hardware and software doctors need to adopt electronic health records (EHRs) for their practices. CalHIPSO is one of 62 federally designated Regional Extension Centers (RECs). Under the 2009 Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health […]