Stacy Lawrence

WASHINGTON—A report released Wednesday morning establishes goals and recommends policy options for making electronic health records a reality within the next decade. The suggestions came from Tommy Thompson, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and from Dr. David Brailer, the recently appointed national coordinator for health IT. The adoption of […]

WASHINGTON—Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson on Wednesday presented a plan for building a national health care information infrastructure to improve health care technology. Thompson, along with Dr. David Brailer, the recently-appointed National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, outlined the 10-year plan for an audience of policy makers and health IT industry leaders at […]

Nurses are the largest group of health care providers in the United States, with 2.7 million professionals. But so far, their IT needs have been neglected by health care organizations and IT vendors alike, according to a new study by marketing research firm Spyglass Consulting Group. The study consisted of one hundred in-depth interviews with […]

Epigenomics, a Berlin-based company specializing in diagnostics based on genomics, is scheduled to go public on the Frankfurt stock market July 16. It will be the first biotechnology company to go public there since the genomics bubble of 2001. The company has research relationships with pharmaceutical giants including F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. and AstraZeneca. Epigenomics […]

With the explosion of data-intensive research tools, pharmaceutical companies are still struggling to understand how to most effectively make use of them. This package has the first few of a series of interviews with pharmaceutical executives about how are beginning to use genomics to enhance their drug discovery pipelines. It examines the usefulness of microarrays, […]

Two-thirds of major health care providers are planning to grow their IT budgets by more than 10 percent in the next few years, according to a recently released study by industry research firm Datamonitor. The report suggests that concerns over medical errors and stronger support from the federal government will drive the IT budget growth. […]

In a press conference with reporters last week, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson said that the Bush administration will not promote legislation to put timelines on the implementation of health care IT. During the Medicare prescription drug benefit legislation debate last year, language requiring e-prescribing fell by the wayside. […]

The role of IT in health care is commanding more and more interest from the top tiers of the federal government, with the House of Representatives now working on ways to advance the use of technology in the field. Since President Bushs State of the Union address in January, health care IT has drawn unprecedented […]

SAN FRANCISCO—The annual BIO conference of the Biotechnology Industry Organization made a splash here, on the streets as well as in the expo hall. The event gathered more than 16,000 attendees and, by some counts, several hundred protestors. The crowd picketing the BIO 2004 conference made it very clear that the public has many concerns […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Genomics research has unearthed a wide range of approaches that drug companies can use to treat diseases. Now, the big question for these companies is how to choose the right genes to go after in drug development. Finding ways to optimize this discovery process was the subject of a Tuesday panel at BIO, a […]