M.L. Baker

Under a new program from the Centers of Medicaid and Medicare, doctors in solo and small medical practices will soon be eligible for up to $10,000 more a year—if they can demonstrate that their performance is up to snuff. Among other criteria, doctors will be evaluated for the percentage of diabetic patients whose glucose is […]

Just under one in four community physicians are using electronic health records; fewer than one in 10 are using EHRs that perform at least four functions deemed critical by the Institute of Medicine. Thats according to a new study specially commissioned to provide a reliable baseline to assess future IT adoption. Although many surveys on […]

The personal data of Medicare patients is at risk because Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has not held its network contractor to its own security standards, according to a report issued by the Government Accountability Office. The GAO concluded that information on the network could be disclosed without authorization and that vulnerabilities could be […]

The low adoption of electronic medical records and e-prescribing is well known. Now, a new study has worse news: most physicians do not use inexpensive, widely accessible IT tools in their practice. The study, to be published in November in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, finds that fewer than 4 percent of physicians e-mail […]

Researchers at MIT and Harvard have released a public database that they hope will be the seed of a new human genome project, one that lets researchers find potential treatments for disease in a specialized search engine. Both diseases and drugs have so-called genetic signatures—sets of genes known to be turned on or off, up […]

A survey finds that local, state and regional initiatives for exchanging health information have matured significantly since a similar survey conducted in 2005, but most efforts are still in the planning stages. Of 165 initiatives identified across the United States, 27 percent of respondents identified themselves in the implementation stage and 16 percent said the […]

A group of 1,700 independent doctors in Michigan has turned to Compuware Covisint to share and access patient health information. The move marks Covisints entry into services for IPAs (independent physician associations). IPAs include many community offices with just a handful of doctors, and is by far the category least likely to use information technology […]

When it comes to providing health care to seniors, the federal government is not a smart shopper. Thats according to a report by the Institute of Medicine, which recommends dramatic changes in how doctors are paid for their care, a recommendation which could be a boon to the health IT industry. “The current payment system […]

In a brief statement on Sept. 20, Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt announced that Robert Kolodner is the interim health IT czar. Kolodner is currently serving as chief health informatics officer of the Veterans Health Administration, and his office oversees the VAs extensive EHR system, called VistA, and maintains over 140 national […]

At a hearing of a federal committee charged with improving health care through IT, experts laid out the promise and perils of establishing digital health records that patients could access electronically. An important preliminary barrier is convincing patients that such records can help them and not be used against them. Many health payers and employers […]