Driven to distraction by technology
The typical office worker is interrupted every three minutes by a phone call, e-mail, instant message or other distraction. The problem is that it takes about eight uninterrupted minutes for our brains to get into a really creatiNo warnings or errors were found. ve state. (Editor's note: No wonder clinicians are often upset by alerts and reminders!

Big Brother Wants to Be Diet Cop
Conceived after a sharp rise in diabetes deaths over the past 20 years, the plan would require medical labs to report to the city the results of a certain type of test that indicates how well individual patients are controlling their diabetes.

Testimony by David Brailer and Don Detmer (and others) from Congresswoman Johnson's Hearing on Health Care Information Technology
The hearing focused on the approach currently being taken by the Administration to speed the adoption of health IT and areas where congressional involvement can further those efforts.

Clinical Knowledge Management: Opportunities and Challenges
This book establishes a convergence in thinking between knowledge management and knowledge engineering healthcare applications. It assembles original and innovative contributions in the area of KM and knowledge engineering applications for healthcare systems and clinical engineering applications. (Editor's Note: I wrote Chapter 16!

Sticky Insecurity
Security is only as good as the weakest point. To comply with HIPAA, the hospital needed to tighten up its network security. Generic passwords and publicly displayed passwords just wouldn't cut it. The CIO of Community Medical Centers in Fresno, Calif., could see the security threats to his information systems because they were sticky notes containing passwords and log in instructions pasted on about 2,600 computer workstations across the acute-care hospital system.

Engineers and Health Professionals Should Work Together To Address Quality and Cost of Health Care
The U.S. health care industry has neglected engineering strategies and technologies that have revolutionized quality, productivity, and performance in many other industries, says a new report from the National Academies' National Academy of Engineering and Institute of Medicine. This "collective inattention" has contributed to serious consequences in health care -- nearly 100,000 preventable deaths per year, outdated procedures, about a half-trillion dollars wasted annually through inefficiency, costs rising at roughly three times the rate of inflation, and 43 million people uninsured.

Majority of Consumers Believe Electronic Medical Records Can Improve Medical Care, Accenture Survey Finds
The survey, which queried more than 500 U.S. health care consumers, found that the overwhelming majority of respondents believe that electronic medical records can: 1) improve the quality of care (93 percent of respondents), 2) reduce the number of treatment errors in hospitals (92 percent of respondents), 3) lower health care costs overall (75 percent of respondents), and 4) reduce the amount of time patients spend waiting in doctors’ offices and emergency rooms (78 percent of respondents).

Clinical Data Standards in Health Care: Five Case Studies
This report provides a general overview of clinical data standards and highlights how different organizations are using those standards to implement interoperable software solutions. Five case studies from a spectrum of health care organizations underscore the challenges and opportunities for implementing clinical data standards today.

RFID: Not Ready For Prime Time, Says Study
Radio frequency identification remains an emerging technology, not ready for prime time, and not likely to change during the next two to five years, according to a survey released this week by AMR Research.