Quality Reporting in Primary Care: a Case Study at Partners HealthCare
Understanding and improving clinical practice requires timely access to integrated views of data. Partners HealthCare is using quality reporting tools, integrated with EHR data, to modify clinical workflows and achieve better quality metrics. Jonathan Einbinder, MD, MPH - Corporate Manager for Quality Data Management at Partners will describe how Report Central, the solution developed at Partners and now being offered commercially by Recombinant Data Corp., is being used to support pay for performance, quality measurement, and clinical operations.

Perlegen Gains Exclusive Access to Data on Four Million Patients to Enable Personalized Medicine
Perlegen Sciences, Inc. announced today that it has formed a personalized medicine collaboration with an undisclosed electronic medical records (EMR) provider to identify and develop genetic markers to help predict how patients are likely to respond to specific medical treatments. Perlegen and its partner will mine data from the EMR’s growing information warehouse, which currently contains clinical treatment and outcome data on roughly four million patients, to enable the identification of subsets of patient records which meet highly specific inclusion and exclusion criteria. Working via each patient’s individual care provider, Perlegen will then seek to obtain DNA from these highly-selected patients in a HIPAA-compliant, IRB-approved manner, to help physicians address various medical situations in which genetically-based predictions about treatment response may help significantly improve patient care. (Ed. This story got a lot of people upset. Here is a link to the CEO's response.

UCLA hospital bans cellphones, laptops
UCLA's neuropsychiatric hospital has banned all cellphones and laptop computers after a patient posted group photos of other patients on a social networking website. In a March 3 memo announcing the ban, Strouse wrote that he did not want to ask staff members to check whether cellphones or laptops had cameras, so he decided to ban them all. (Ed. Funny they didn't actually ban CAMERAS!)

SquareLoop debuts HIPAA-compliant healthcare text messaging system
The text messaging system, a new feature on SquareLoop's Mobile Alert Network, is HIPAA-compliant for regulations governing encryption of patients' electronic records and provides an application for secure mobile-originated text messages.

Long-Term Patterns of Online Evidence Retrieval Use in General Practice: A 12-Month Study
This was a prospective cohort study of 59 clinicians who had a computer with Internet access in their consulting room. On average clinicians conducted 9.9 searches per month in the first 2 months of the study. After this, usage dropped to 4.4 searches per GP in the third month and then levelled off to between 0.4 and 2.6 searches per GP per month. The majority of searches (79.2%) were conducted during practice hours on weekdays. The most frequent searches related to diagnosis (33.6%) and treatment (34.5%). GPs will use an online evidence retrieval system in routine practice; however, usage rates drop significantly after initial introduction of the system.

Europe-wide project to detect drug reactions
The project will involve a consortium of 18 leading European research institutions using clinical data from the electronic healthcare records (EHRs) of over 30m patients from European countries, including the Netherlands, Denmark, UK and Italy. ALERT will use a variety of text mining, epidemiological and other computational techniques to analyse the EHRs to detect ‘signals’ - combinations of drugs and suspected adverse events that warrant further investigation.