Stacy Lawrence

At the end of April, the Food and Drug Administration will officially require drug makers and marketers to have a bar code on all drugs sold to American hospitals. And although the biopharmaceutical companies may be starting to achieve compliance, hospitals arent remotely equipped to use the bar-coded data. In February 2004, the FDA issued […]

When emergency medical technicians transmit electrocardiograms directly to a cardiologists handheld device, heart attack patients can potentially receive direct clot removal in half the usual time. Thats what cardiologists at Duke University Medical Center and NorthEast Medical Center in Concord, N.C., found in a recent study. Cutting this time is critical because the sooner a […]

In an effort to make baseline health care quality statistics more widely available to health care facilities, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services, recently launched an interactive online tool. The new State Snapshot Web tool is based on the 2005 National Healthcare Quality Report […]

For the first time, reportedly, researchers have successfully tested an implantable microchip device that is activated wirelessly to deliver controlled doses of drugs into the body over a prolonged period of time. The technology comes from MicroChips, a privately held company specializing in implantable drug delivery and biosensors. The results of the study were described […]

Records of cancer patients nationwide may soon be networked for researchers to access, and now a new study has found a way to de-identify individual records, making the project more feasible. De-identifying electronic medical records so they can be used for research purposes is a must for health care institutions anxious to remain compliant with […]

With the United States and countries around the world facing exploding health care costs, Intel CEO Craig Barrett argues that implementing health IT is a must to creating a workable health care system in his keynote at the annual Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society conference. As U.S. health care costs continue to expand from […]

This may be a breakthrough year for electronic medical records at hospitals. Thats according a survey of more than 200 health care executives, mostly CIOs, at U.S. hospitals released this week by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society at its annual conference. Almost one-quarter of hospital leaders surveyed reported that their organizations have a […]

In 2004, President George W. Bush declared that widespread electronic health record systems and networks would be up and running in the United States within a decade. But according to a recent survey of health care provider organizations released Feb. 13 by Oracle, 38 percent are skeptical that that ambitious goal will be met. This […]

SAN DIEGO—With standards to ensure electronic health record interoperability likely on the way in a few years, the next focus, according to National Health Information Technology Coordinator Dr. David Brailer, should be on gearing up regional health information networks. In a keynote speech here at the annual meeting of Chicago-based HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management […]

Analysts had been optimistic about the potential of using RFID technology to track pharmaceuticals, thereby curbing theft and counterfeiting while encouraging supply chain efficiency. In fact, last year technology market research firm ABI Research estimated that the shipments of life sciences RFID transponders would more than triple by the end of this year. But new […]