Stacy Lawrence

Shortly after a Kaiser Permanente project supervisor circulated an internal e-mail to more than 180,000 employees denouncing the company’s electronic health record system and the alleged financial waste associated with it, Kaiser’s CIO has resigned. Kaiser Foundation Health Plan has been praised as being advanced of its peers when it comes to rolling out its […]

A set of data standards developed by HL7, a health IT standards accreditation organization in the United States, is being jointly published with an international data standards group. Seven additional standards have also been submitted for consideration. So far, health IT data standards in the United States have been entirely the purview of industry groups, […]

The Cancer Genome Atlas project, which aims to analyze the genomic sequences of cancers, recently started work on its initial project. In this pilot phase of this project lung, brain and ovarian cancers will be studied. These types of cancers were chosen as the initial cases because specimens of these cancers are relatively simple for […]

With health care organizations investing millions into IT, it may seem a little strange to find that most nurses receive little or no IT training. But that’s exactly the result of one of the most comprehensive surveys to date about nurses and their IT work environment, conducted by health IT provider CDW Healthcare. One of […]

Premier, a health alliance of more than 200 nonprofit hospitals and health care systems, recently released results from its pay-for-performance demonstration project with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The new data suggests that implementing pay-for-performance measures could result in saving thousands of lives and hundreds of millions of dollars. Pay-for-performance requires that health […]

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the University of Colorado at Boulder have developed a microchip-based test that distinguishes between flu strains and can even help trace the strains back to their origins. The FluChip can be used to identify 72 influenza strains—including the H5N1 avian influenza strain that is currently of such […]

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a Baltimore-based agency, has selected vendors to test the feasibility of allowing covered individuals to access their claims information through personal health records. Capstone Government Solutions, in Nashville, Tenn., and Shared Health, in Chattanooga, Tenn., were chosen to populate PHRs with Medicare beneficiary claims data. Capstone, a joint venture […]

Expected to help manage every health crisis, from pandemics to chronic diseases, a new program is working to help public health departments prepare reliable IT systems to meet these challenges. Currently, information systems for state and local public health department are developed by individual state and local departments so they may not function very effectively […]

Over the last few months, a number of major international grid computing collaborations have been working to uncover more effective treatments for avian flu. Scientists are focusing on a particular research target in the strain of avian flu known as H5N1. In April in the United States, The Rothberg Institute for Childhood diseases released the […]

Nearly one-third of American hospitals aren’t profitable or are just breaking even. That’s consistent with the previous finding of a survey of hospital CEOs conducted two years ago by consulting firm Deloitte & Touche. And while that may not sound very upbeat, the good news for the industry is that it hasn’t gotten any worse […]

At the fifth White House Conference on Aging, held this week and occurring only once a decade, technology took center stage for the first time. Not only was the incorporation of technology into senior’s lives among six guiding principles for the conference, but Intel Corporation chairman Craig Barrett provided a keynote speech for the event. […]

An international research team led by scientists at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard recently announced the completion of a high-quality genome sequence of the domestic dog, along with a catalog of specific genetic differences across several dog breeds. Published in the Dec. 8 issue of the scientific journal Nature, the dog research sheds […]