CIO Insight Staff

At a recent health IT conference, Brailer praised Kaiser’s new electronic medical record system which is rolling out in the San Francisco Bay Area in the next few months. Kaiser’s new medical information system, called HealthConnect, is a $3.3 billion, decade-long initiative that integrates patient data into a single format for quick and secure access. […]

Legislatures across the country are writing health IT bills, and their federal counterparts are busy too. To keep track of who’s sponsoring what, the Health Care Information and Management Systems Society has created a tool called Healthcare IT Legislation Crosswalk. The state tracker is at himss.org/advocacy/news_tracker.asp The federal version is available as a Word document […]

While Vista Beta 1 is stealing most of the headlines this week, Microsoft also is delivering simultaneously on Wednesday to a select group of private testers the first beta of its Longhorn Server product. Microsoft has not yet decided on a final name for the next version of its Windows Server operating system (other than […]

In the last column, I discussed one of those rare authors who produces business books that provide actionable information that is still useful years later, and whose range covers many subject areas. I said I’d cover another of Edward de Bono‘s books, one very different from the last. “Sur/Petition” (HarperBusiness, 1992) is a real classic, […]

The Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions committee passed a hybrid of two health information technology bills. The bill is intended to promote adoption of electronic medical records as well as standards so that technology from different institutions can easily exchange information. The bill had bipartisan support. It was co-sponsored by prominent Democrats Edward Kennedy […]

One of the most acute business bloggers, Ethan “Effern” Johnson, who writes The Vision Thing, has written an entire series of essays with titles riffed off “All of Your Business Books Are Meaningless,” exposing most of the offerings in the genre as vapid gruel. He suggests they are (a) predictable, or (b) slipstreaming fads, or […]

DeKalb Medical Center at Hillandale, Georgia, part of a 40-acre medical campus, is not just the state’s newest hospital: the $65 million facility is the first to be built to accomodate health information technology. There are Internet portals in each patient room. Patient information will be input directly onto computers. Even the X-rays will have […]

The Dolphin Group, a new think tank devoted to discussing health care and information technology, met for the first time at last month’s America’s Health Insurance Plans Institute 2005. The intention of the group is to help address the increasingly complex nature of health care technology implementations. Membership in The Dolphin Group is free, and […]

When Mississippi’s favorite son, Bernard Ebbers, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for his part in the Worldcom/MCI debacle this week, it seemed to be a worthy blood sacrifice to the many tens of thousands of people who suffered at his, and his company’s, hands. The clamor for sacrifice was focused on Ebbers himself. […]

Richard Clarke can’t avoid being controversial. After he released his scathing critique of the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism policy, “Against All Enemies” (Free Press, 2004) early last year, a media firestorm engulfed him. Yet, throughout it all the former Special Advisor to the President on Cyber Security has remained steadfast in his opinions. “This administration is […]

When corporate customers think about their telecom providers, they tend to vacillate between optimism, confusion and concern. No surprise, considering how much the industry has expanded, then consolidated, since the 1980s. But the mergers are making possible a panoply of sophisticated networking services, new billing and provisioning options, and data-/voice-communication possibilities. The problem is, they […]