Stacy Lawrence

The Thai government has launched the Thailand Center of Excellence for Life Sciences Pharmacogenomics Project, in collaboration with Oracle, to gather and unify health records electronically. The project involves the development of a large-scale database of unified electronic health records and is intended to provide safer and more effective medications as well as reduced health […]

A report recently released by the HSC (Center for Studying Health System Change), a nonpartisan policy research organization, revealed that a majority of Medicare fee-for-service outpatient visits were to physicians without significant information technology support for patient care. The study linked Medicare claims data to the nationally representative physician survey conducted by HSC. Researchers found […]

In the last three years, the Canadian government has devoted only about $126 million toward health IT through Canada Health Infoway, the non-profit it created for that purpose. This year, however, the investment skyrocketed 56 percent to reach $195 million. Infoway is a partnership of federal, provincial and territorial governments. Its members are the deputy […]

Informatics research breakthroughs are becoming commonplace in the life sciences at universities and research institutes around the globe, but much of pharmaceutical company research is far less reliant on information technology. Traditionally, major pharmaceutical firms have conducted the vast majority of drug research by tinkering with the chemical structure of molecules and then observing their […]

After a recent conference held by the Managed Care Executive Group, the organization released a list of the top ten issues facing managed care IT executives in America. The group was founded in the late eighties for managed care information services executives and has members from regional managed care groups around the country. “This year’s […]

In the first quarter of this year, there were 22 merger and acquisition deals for health care information technology companies. That number is an increase of 69 percent over the previous quarter and 47 percent over the same quarter one year ago, according to a recent report from health care market research firm Irving Levin […]

The Department of Defense is continuing to roll out an EMR system that has been in continuous development since the late ’80s. Serving almost 10 million military personnel and families, the implementation of and lessons learned from this project could provide some clues as to what lies ahead for the broader usage of electronic medical […]

Until a study was released last month in the JAMA showing that the entry of patient prescriptions by doctors into a computerized system may actually increase certain types of medication errors, this health technology system seemed like a clear-cut benefit for health care providers and their patients. But now, given the negative conclusions of the […]

Subscribing to an online service lets hospitals have a pharmacist on hand 24-by-7, even when there’s not one on-site. Nearly 4,000 hospitals in the United States don’t have around-the-clock pharmacy services, due largely to a persistent shortage of pharmacists that’s expected to continue to worsen over the next several decades. Union Hospital in Elkton, Md., […]

Before a few years ago, biometrics company Ultra-Scan had relatively little interest in the health care sector. But as health information technology started to become a national political imperative, the company began realizing that its fingerprint-scanning technology could help with the complex issue of positive patient identification. The first rollout of its fingerprint technology in […]