With patients across the country voicing a growing desire for greater engagement in and control over their medical care, a new study involving patients in Boston, Pennsylvania and Seattle will examine the impact of letting patients see the notes that doctors record during and after their visit. Funded through a $1.4 million grant from the ...

(Editor's note: This blog is written by ADVANCE technology blogger Joe Weber, MBA, MPAS, PA-C. It was originally posted on the ADVANCE for Physician Assistants web site.) I did it. No longer able to wait another day, I burst in to the local Apple store and bought myself a shiny new iPad. That was 72 hours ago, and now my shiny new toy is gone. ...

Editor's note: Associate Editor Mark McGraw filed this blog post while covering HIMSS10 in Atlanta. Dr. David Blumenthal, national coordinator for health information technology, addressed an overflowing crowd of HIMSS attendees at this morning's keynote address. The timing seemed ideal, less than 24 hours after Dr. Blumenthal led an ONC Townhall ...

Hundreds of thousands are injured, communications are scant and trauma centers are makeshift, at best. So how are medical records maintained? They're not, according to reports surfacing from Haiti. Eyewitness accounts tell of overrun hospitals resorting to rudimentary record-keeping processes--pieces of paper tacked to beds and bodies, listing ...

If you've already pored through the NPRM on ''meaningful use'' and the IFR on electronic health record (EHR) implementation standards, then bravo. That's a whopping 692 pages in total--a major undertaking for anyone coming back from the holiday weekend. Not quite ready to hunker down on the Federal Register's site, I surfed over to a Healthcare ...

The top 10 medical advances of this decade have been released, and harnessing information technology shows up at No. 2. Really? I find this a bit surprising. I'm not sure the advances in health information technology (HIT) deserve this accolade yet. A top 10 list of medical advances one decade into this century has been put together by ABC ...

I've been thinking about personal health records (PHRs) lately (probably because of my article on PHRs going live tomorrow), and it somehow brings me to ''Rent.'' I got on a big Broadway musical kick in junior high, and ''Rent'' started it all. I saw the show twice, listened to the soundtrack and even watched the movie, which--big surprise ...

If you've been following Jay's blog, ''XY Files in and MT World,'' recently, you know there have been some frightening reports of medical records being sold overseas. It's enough to make you hunker down in the States and demand your records stay local. On the contrary, some patients are ditching domestic services and seeking medical care abroad. ...

For the past few weeks, I've had Michael Jackson's ''Somebody's Watching Me'' stuck in my head. I blame Geico for making it the theme song for its ubiquitous ad campaign. (Seriously, that bug-eyed bundle of money is everywhere.) But today, the ditty popped into my head for good reason. Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston is ...

An emergency department (ED) in a facility in Western Sydney, Australia, banned the use of its EHR, going back to paper and pen, after struggling with downtime on the system. While a North South Wales (NSW) opposition health spokeswoman claimed that government is ''putting lives at risk'' with the system, the NSW government denied the claim, with ...