Connecting Americans to Their Health Care: Consumer Authentication for Networked Personal Health Information
This paper offers a framework for processes by which participants in electronic health information networks can be assured that an individual consumer is who she claims to be. The framework includes these four components:

Online house calls click with doctors
Since the dawn of e-mail, patients have been pleading for more doctors to offer medical advice online. No traffic jams, no long waits, no germ-infested offices with outdated magazines and bad elevator music. There was always one major roadblock: Most health insurers wouldn't pay for it. Until now. In recent weeks, Aetna Inc., the nation's largest insurer, and Cigna Corp. have agreed to reimburse doctors for online visits.

Promoting electronic health record adoption. Is it the correct focus?
In an article for the March/April issue of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, Dr. Donald Simborg wrote that the government’s policy of promoting EHR adoption, “if not modified, may backfire” and fail to achieve its goals of enhancing the quality of health care while holding costs down.

Measuring The Health Of Nations: Updating An Earlier Analysis
We compared trends in deaths considered amenable to health care before age seventy-five between 1997–98 and 2002–03 in the United States and in eighteen other industrialized countries. Such deaths account, on average, for 23 percent of total mortality under age seventy-five among males and 32 percent among females. The decline in amenable mortality in all countries averaged 16 percent over this period. The United States was an outlier, with a decline of only 4 percent.

Computer-assisted bar-coding system significantly reduces clinical laboratory specimen identification errors in a pediatric oncology hospital
A bar code-based electronic positive patient and specimen identification (EPPID) system was implemented at a pediatric oncology hospital to reduce errors in patient and laboratory specimen identification. The EPPID system included bar-code identifiers and handheld personal digital assistants supporting real-time order verification. A significant reduction in the median percentage of mislabeled specimens was observed in the 3-year study period from 0.03% to 0.005% (P < .001). This change was observed in the 12 months after full system implementation.

My favorite CIO website
Mr. HIS-Talk is an anonymous CIO who writes about interesting news items, tips sent in by his readers, and general thoughts on the field. By far my favorite blog. He/she really tells it like is. Also has a partner on the site, Inga, who provides excellent comments as well. This site is a must read for everyone who wants to keep up with the business side of health information technology.

My second favorite CIO website
John D. Halamka, MD, MS, is Chief Information Officer of the CareGroup Health System, Chief Information Officer and Dean for Technology at Harvard Medical School, Chairman of the New England Health Electronic Data Interchange Network (NEHEN), CEO of MA-SHARE (the Regional Health Information Organization), Chair of the US Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP), and a practicing Emergency Physician. He records his experiences with infrastructure, applications, policies, management, and governance as well as muses on such topics such as reducing our carbon footprint, standardizing data in healthcare, and living life to its fullest.

Government Health-IT Webcasts
A nice collection or recent webcasts addressing key health informatics topics of interest.