Stacy Lawrence

At a recent conference held by Massachusetts Institute of Technologys Center for Biomedical Innovation, the university and the Food and Drug Administration announced that they have an agreement to collaborate on the development of a real-time drug safety monitoring system. Currently, the FDA relies entirely on reporting through its MedWatch program, which receives more than […]

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Harvard Medical School, Albany Medical Center and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are collaborating to develop a new approach to surgical training—a virtual simulator that will allow surgeons to handle computer-generated organs with actual tools used in minimally invasive surgery. Based on haptics, a science focused on the sense of […]

The Food and Drug Administration offered a reminder to the pharmaceutical industry that by December companies will be required to provide pedigree tracking for prescription drugs all the way along the supply chain from manufacture to consumer sale. Along that route, drugs can change hands as many as 10 times. To aid in compliance, the […]

Blue Cross Blue Shield Association is creating a database of health insurance claims from 79 million of its clients. The data will have no personal identifiers and is intended to be a resource for evaluating health care trends, treatments, practices and providers. Dubbed BHI (Blue Health Intelligence), the database is currently being pilot-tested and is […]

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a Baltimore-based agency, has selected vendors to test the feasibility of allowing covered individuals to access their claims information through personal health records. Capstone Government Solutions, in Nashville, Tenn., and Shared Health, in Chattanooga, Tenn., were chosen to populate PHRs with Medicare beneficiary claims data. Capstone, a joint venture […]

Malaria is the worlds most common parasitic infection, affecting more than 500 million people annually and killing more than 1 million. Those most likely to die as a result of malaria are African children; the disease kills one African child every 30 seconds. In order to help combat malaria, CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear […]

Intel and Eskaton, an elder care non-profit based in California, recently announced that they will begin investigating the best way to bring Internet-based personal health records to the elderly residents of Eskaton facilities. To evaluate the usefulness of Internet-based health files, Eskaton is starting a pilot program with some of its residents who volunteered to […]

Electronic medical records are often viewed as little more than electronic filing systems, but they are increasingly being used to research the way physicians diagnose and treat their patients, as well as patient health outcomes. PPRNet (Practice Partner Research Network) is partnering with MUSC (the Medical University of South Carolina) for the $1.6 million, four-year […]

Expected to help manage every health crisis, from pandemics to chronic diseases, a new program is working to help public health departments prepare reliable IT systems to meet these challenges. Currently, information systems for state and local public health department are developed by individual state and local departments so they may not function very effectively […]

The World Community Grid, founded at the end of 2004 by IBM for nonprofit research projects in the name of the public good, recently announced that one of its two major research projects focusing on human proteome folding has been launched into its second phase. The project, which began at the Institute for Systems Biology […]