Collaborative Response to NHII RFI submitted by American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) et al.
This document represents a collaborative – indeed a consensus – process among hundreds of the leading contributors to the American health care system. This document is based upon a collaborative effort of organizations that diverge on many issues of policy, business, and philosophy – except their shared belief in the importance of a new national framework for exchanging health information...

New Medical Informatics Research Web site!
Researchers at the Regenstrief Institute and Indianna University have created a new website that contains links to interesting news items and new research results.

Critical Review of the Google Scholar Beta
Google Scholar has enormous gaps in its coverage of publishers' archives, and implicitly in the direct links to the full-text documents therein. The citedness scores of documents displayed in the results lists have great potential for choosing the most promising articles and books on a subject, but they often are inflated.

The XI Havana International Convention INFORMATICA 2005
It is their intention to make this convention one of the biggest forums of scientific and technical interchange of this specialty in Latin America, taking into account the increasing interest of specialists and professionals of this branch and the great variety of topics to debate.

Pharmacy Informatics-related resources including job descriptions
ASHP is introducing a "Shared Member Resources" section webpage. While these documents are not official ASHP documents, they will allow sharing of job descriptions, policies and procedures and protocols in one central location.

One in Five Group Practices Now Use EHRs
One in five group physician practices in America now has some sort of electronic health record with a database containing patient medical and demographic information—not just a scanned image of a paper chart.

White House to request $125 million for healthcare IT
National Health Information Technology Coordinator David J. Brailer, MD, said Bush is requesting that $50 million in the 2005 budget be reprogrammed to fund Brailer’s office, which Congress failed to fund in its 2005 appropriations bill. If Congress approves the reprogramming, that money would be spent on, among other things, further development of regional health information networks, which form the building blocks of a larger national strategy to interconnect hospitals, physicians and patients.

Informatician puts his ID on the Line...or is that in his arm?
Harvard Medical School's chief information officer, Dr. John Halamka, had himself injected with a VeriChip identification microchip in December. The rice grain-sized chips, designed to be injected into the arm's fatty tissue, can be scanned like a bar code to call up personal information such as name, blood type and medical records.