MyChart—A New Mode of Care Delivery: 2005 Personal Health Link Research Report
Patients were highly satisfied with the e-mail exchanges they had with their PCP. They were particularly satisfied that e-mail messaging allows them to conveniently communicate directly with their PCP. Work time per e-mail encounter increases as clinical intensity increases: high clinical intensity encounters took over eight minutes to complete. Work time per telephone encounter showed a similar increase with clinical intensity. In this case study, there was no difference in the work time for e-mail encounters and the telephone encounters in which the PCP spoke directly with the patient. This study found strong evidence that e-mail encounters reduced office visits and telephone calls to KP.

Implementing the Electronic Medical Record in the Exam Room: The Effect on Physician-Patient Communication and Patient Satisfaction
With the implementation of the electronic medical record—called HealthConnect—in all exam rooms throughout the Kaiser Permanente health care delivery system, how computers in the exam room affects physician-patient communication is a new concern. Patient satisfaction scores were obtained for all primary and specialty care physicians in a large medical center in Southern California. Results show no significant changes in patient satisfaction for these physicians. (Note: there does not appear to be any evidence inNo warnings or errors were found. this report that clinicians actually used the computers in the exam room.)

Medication-related clinical decision support in computerized provider order entry systems: a review
Medication-related decision support is probably best introduced into healthcare organizations in two stages, basic and advanced. Basic decision support includes drug-allergy checking, basic dosing guidance, formulary decision support, duplicate therapy checking, and drug-drug interaction checking. Advanced decision support includes dosing support for renal insufficiency and geriatric patients, guidance for medication-related laboratory testing, drug-pregnancy checking, and drug-disease contraindication checking.

Google and OpenMRS Join for a "Summer Of Code 2007"
This summer, students around the world have the opportunity to participate in an exciting collaboration between OpenMRSand Google, Inc. to further develop an open-source medical record system that improves the care of patients with HIV/AIDS, TB, and Malaria. The Google Summer of Code 2007 program provides promising student software developers an opportunity to help these vulnerable populations by spending their summer vacation writing new code that will be used in countries throughout the developing world. During this twelve week program, successful applicants will work directly with assigned mentors to complete their choice of a variety of focused development tasks laid out by the OpenMRS collaborative.