A Medical Publisher’s Unusual Prescription: Online Ads
Reed Elsevier introduced a Web portal, www.OncologySTAT.com, that gives doctors free access to the latest articles from 100 of its own medical journals and plans to sell advertisements against the content.

Validation of a diagnostic reminder system in emergency medicine: a multi-centre study
Researchers evaluated a novel web-based reminder system, which provides rapid diagnostic advice to users based on free text search terms. Clinical data were collected from patients presenting to 3 emergency departments with acute medical problems and entered into the diagnostic system. The displayed results were assessed against the final discharge diagnoses for patients who were admitted to hospital (diagnostic accuracy) and against a set of "appropriate" diagnoses for each case provided by an expert panel (potential utility). Data were collected from 594 patients (53.4% of screened attendances). Mean age was 49.4 years and the majority had significant past illnesses. Most were assessed first by junior doctors (70%) and 44.6% were admitted to hospital. Overall, the diagnostic system displayed the final discharge diagnosis in 95% of inpatients and 90% of "must-not-miss" diagnoses suggested by the expert panel. The discharge diagnosis appeared within the first 10 suggestions in 78% of cases.

HealthBridge builds on its clinical messaging system
HealthBridge, the largest health information exchange in the country, has launched real-time automated disease management reporting by leveraging its clinical messaging system. 94% of all test results – from hospitals and national or local labs in the Greater Cincinnati tri-state area – the exchange region – are distributed electronically. That’s 2.1 million results per month being fed to 25 separate electronic medical record systems.

Potential of electronic personal health records
Although patients may welcome passive access to records, the greatest benefits are likely to come from multifunctional, interactive systems that are integrated with providers' record systems and can support education, self care, and communication with the health service. However, this increased utility may decrease security, and patients will have to decide whether this risk is acceptable for them.

For doctors, diagnosing gets a technological boost
Although Isabel is used in only 18 hospitals, interest in similar decision-support systems is growing in the medical community. Isabel is priced at around $50,000 a year for a typical 300 bed hospital.

The Softer Side of Health-IT
“The big thing is that it’s about people,” said Ghosh who believes 80% of health-IT implementation failures are attributed to social and organizational factors. Too many other groups gloss over this reality, he maintains. “We are a group of people who are concerned with how the technical and social have to be considered together,” Paul Gorman explained. “A lot of our methods are drawn from and borrowed from anthropology.”

Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart
In the past, one could get by on intuition and experience. Times have changed. Today, the name of the game is data. Ian Ayres shows us how and why in this groundbreaking book SUPER CRUNCHERS. Not only is it fun to read, it just may change the way you think. Check out the chapter on ' How Should Physicians Treat Evidence Based Medicine'.

Clinical decision support software for chronic heart failure
This current article describes the potential value of clinical decision support software (CDSS) in the treatment of patients with chronic heart failure and practical aspects of using such a tool. Barriers to implementation of our tool included relatively low computer skills among family physicians and a lack of complexity within CDSS in addressing the wider nonmedical needs of patients. Improving computer skills, integrating CDSS into referral pathways, and requests for investigation may be ways of enhancing the use of this technology.