I first heard about Dave deBronkart, aka ''e-patient Dave'' about a year ago when I attended HealthCamp Philadelphia, and I've been following him ever since (literally-the man's all over Twitter). He's one of the most vocal proponents of getting patients more involved in their care, and the folks in Washington have taken notice. He's become a de ...

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 ...

Nuance engaged 17,000 physicians in a survey to learn about physicians’ hopes and concerns with respect to healthcare information technology, as well as to gauge their understanding of developing healthcare government policy.  Just before the Department of Health and Human Services announced its draft regulations outlining meaningful use ...

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 ...

I have to wonder sometimes--are electronic health records (EHRs) really the way to go? Now, before someone launches a spiel about how they save time, cut costs and improve the patient experience, let me tell you about last night's visit to the dentist. It had been a while since my last exam, and this was a new dentist. As I plopped into the ...

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 ...

No matter your stance on war, it's only right to honor and thank veterans who put their lives on the line for our country. Military personnel witness firsthand what most of us find too hard to watch through a camera lens, and it's bound to have an impact. The least we could do, then, is offer quality health care upon their return. The Department ...

Everyone's sick of swine flu (pun not intended, I swear), so apologies in advance for striking up yet another conversation about it, but I couldn't help posting when I heard about post-vaccine monitoring. What? What's that you say? Monitoring? As in data, systems and overall management of what one might call ''health information?'' Surely this ...

I'm what you might call ''doctor phobic.'' I haven't had a check up since 2001, and that was required to get into college. After high school, I moved to the Philadelphia suburbs from quiet nook upstate in a rural area lovingly referred to as the ''Polish Poconos.'' Where I grew up, you knew your doctors. We had one doctor who took care of my mom's ...

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 ...