Rules Management Technology and the Health Care Industry
Rules management technology has the potential to make a major contribution to the health care industry. In fact, the use of rules technology in clinical decision support and reimbursement/claims systems may be the most important single information system advance for health care providers and payers over the next 5 years.

The DrugBank database
The DrugBank database is a unique bioinformatics and cheminformatics resource that combines detailed drug (i.e. chemical, pharmacological and pharmaceutical) data with comprehensive drug target (i.e. sequence, structure, pathway) information. The database contains nearly 4100 drug entries including >700 FDA-approved small molecule drugs, 110 FDA-approved biotech (protein/peptide) drugs, >100 nutraceuticals and >3200 experimental drugs. Additionally, more than 15,000 protein (i.e. drug target) sequences are linked to these drug entries. Each DrugCard entry contains more than 80 data fields with half of the information being devoted to drug/chemical data and the other half devoted to drug target or protein data. Users may query DrugBank in any number of ways.

Voluntary Electronic Reporting of Medical Errors and Adverse Events
Registered nurses provided nearly half of the reports; physicians contributed less than 2%. Thirty-four percent of reports were classified as nonmedication-related clinical events, 33% as medication/infusion related, 13% were falls, 13% as administrative, and 6% other. Among 80% of reports that identified level of impact, 53% were events that reached a patient ("patient events"), 13% were near misses that did not reach the patient, and 14% were hospital environment problems. Among 49,341 patient events, 67% caused no harm, 32% temporary harm, 0.8% life threatening or permanent harm, and 0.4% contributed to patient deaths.

Predicting the Adoption of Electronic Health Records by Physicians: When Will Health Care be Paperless?
The promise of improved care quality and cost control has prompted a call for universal EHR adoption by 2014. The EHR products now available are unlikely to achieve full diffusion in a critical market segment within the time frame being targeted by policy makers. Under current conditions, EHR adoption will reach its maximum market share in 2024 in the small practice setting.

Open Source Consumer Health Vocabulary Initiative
The aim of consumer health vocabularies is to help bridge the communication gap between consumers and health care professionals. Using such vocabularies, technical terms may be "translated" into lay language, such as "exanthema" into "rash."

The Health Care Standards Landscape
This site allows you to search for information on healthcare standards and on organizations developing, promoting, or using these standards.

Doomsday vault to avert world famine
Within a large concrete room, hewn out of a mountain on a freezing-cold island just 1000 kilometres from the North Pole, could lie the future of humanity. The room is a "doomsday vault" designed to hold around 2 million seeds, representing all known varieties of the world's crops. It is being built to safeguard the world's food supply against nuclear war, climate change, terrorism, rising sea levels, earthquakes and the ensuing collapse of electricity supplies. (Note: Do you think we should be building something similar for all those patient's whose medical records are now in electronic format only?)