Stacy Lawrence

A consortium to encourage connected personal health technologies dubbed the Continua Health Alliance was announced recently. The industry group intends to establish an environment conducive to the development of networked personal health and fitness products and services. A wide range of devices are targeted for connection to health care providers, including everything from the bathroom […]

RFID was already supposed to be used to track prescription drugs in the United States, ensuring that counterfeit products are screened out. But the industry is way behind on adoption, and the Food and Drug Administration is expected to come out soon with a new, more vigorous RFID mandate. In June, the Food and Drug […]

IT giant IBM has recently helped to bring a series of tech-savvy medical devices to market, including a remote pacemaker monitor and programmer approved by the FDA in April. In a series of recent partnerships, IBM has become increasingly focused on the integration of IT into medical devices. These innovations are intended to improve patient […]

Small companies continue to offer the best health IT products, according to awards recently given at the 22nd annual Towards the Electronic Patient Record conference in Baltimore. More than 200 leading vendors of electronic health records and related IT showcased their products at the conference. /zimages/2/28571.gifTo read about products recognized at TEPR in previous years, […]

Over the last few months, a number of major international grid computing collaborations have been working to uncover more effective treatments for avian flu. Scientists are focusing on a particular research target in the strain of avian flu known as H5N1. In April in the United States, The Rothberg Institute for Childhood diseases released the […]

With massive quantities of highly sensitive information making its way through a number of different companies, business units and regulatory agencies, biopharmaceutical companies need a very high bar for the digital identification of individuals and the verification of signatures. Recently, the SAFE-BioPharma Association, an industry initiative launched in 2005 and sponsored by the Pharmaceutical Research […]

In an effort to make good on its commitment to the health care industry to be present from “lab to bedside,” Microsoft announced another series of partnerships aiming at the health care industry. At the World Health Care Congress from April 17 to 19, Microsoft released its vision for “knowledge driven health plans” in conjunction […]

An overview of the scientific studies published in the last few years concludes that large health care institutions have relatively successfully incorporated health IT, while small physician offices continue to lag. The AHRQ (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality), a division of the Department of Health and Human Services, recently released a report, here in […]

Initial system architecture and policy recommendations for regional health information exchanges were released recently by a public-private cooperative group. In an effort to standardize the exchange of health information, Connecting for Health, a public-private collaborative of more than 100 organizations, recently released technical specifications and policy guidelines. Dubbed the “Common Framework,” the set of specifications […]

Microsoft on April 4 announced the formation of the BioIT Alliance, a cross-industry group created to enhance the ability to use and share biomedical data, at the Life Sciences Conference and Expo in Boston. The working group will take on a series of “proof-of-concept” projects to understand how Microsofts platforms can enhance the integration of […]