Health Information Technology Is A Vehicle, Not A Destination: A Conversation With David J. Brailer
Dr. David Brailer estimates that if the current rate of interoperable electronic health record (EHR) adoption is sustained through 2014, it would create a launchpad for quality gain and health care spending reduction in excess of 50 percent in the subsequent decade. But he also identifies several environmental changes as critical. These include providers' ceding control of clinical information to patients, universal public availability of provider performance comparisons, and moving health policy from a no-man's land between government and market control.

Mayor Bloomberg proposed sweeping changes in health care financing through new use of information technology and new focus on prevention
The Mayor spoke about the importance of information technology in health care and the role it can play in preventive care, detailing the successes that the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation and the United States Department of Veterans Affairs have had implementing Electronic Health Records systems. To speed the pace of change, the Mayor called for a new national goal: five years from today, every doctor's office, clinic, and hospital in America that accepts Medicaid and Medicare must be using prevention-oriented Electronic Health Records.

Warnings Over Privacy of U.S. Health Network
The G.A.O. said the administration had taken only rudimentary steps to safeguard sensitive personal data that would be exchanged over the network. But Dr. Robert M. Kolodner, disputed the findings. Dr. Kolodner said his department was “very committed to privacy and security as it works toward the president’s goal” of switching medical records from paper to electronic files.

Clinical information system availability and use in urban and rural hospitals
A survey addressing this purpose was completed by 74 (63.7%) Iowa hospitals. Rural hospitals lag behind urban hospitals in terms of many CIS applications. More than 80% of the urban hospitals, but less than 40% of the rural hospitals, reported using computers to collect basic clinical information for potential use in an electronic medical record (EMR) and computerized provider order entry (CPOE) system.

A new scheme for data sharing -- Semantic interoperability aims to ease data sharing among disparate health systems
An essential problem with data sharing stems from every system having its own way of representing data. Relational databases, for example, each have their own schema for defining tables and fields. “It’s very difficult to share data in relational databases,” said Susie Stephens, principal product manager for life sciences at Oracle. “It’s hard to merge relational schema and hard to understand someone else’s schema.” Even Extensible Markup Language (XML), a technology designed to ease the exchange of data, has limitations, Stephens said. “The semantics aren’t explicit within XML,” she said. XML imposes a certain grammar, or syntax, but machines may still stumble on semantics.

UCSF nurses test tablet PCs
The C5 looks like a small slate-style tablet PC with a handle at the top. It has been coated with a special material that can withstand the frequent use of disinfectant cleansers and that helps protect the device against falls. The C5 is directly connected to the other medical equipment used to take a patient's pulse or measure their blood pressure, so data is instantly recorded by the C5 directly off the medical device and transferred to a hospital server.