KLAS CPOE Digest 2006 Shows Eclipsys CPOE Solutions are Used by More Physicians Than Any Other Vendor's for the Fourth Consecutive Year
The study found that Eclipsys CPOE solutions were validated to be live in 55 healthcare organizations participating in the survey (multi-facility enterprises were counted as a single organization), versus 42 for the next-leading competitor. More than 42,000 physicians utilize an Eclipsys CPOE solution, nearly twice as much as the nearest competitor (less than 24,000). Data from the report also showed that Clinical Manager is live and in use at more inpatient organizations than any other vendor's solution (33, versus 31 for the nearest competitor).

Physicians’ Use of Email With Patients: Factors Influencing Electronic Communication and Adherence to Best Practices
This large survey of physicians, practicing in ambulatory settings, shows only modest advances in the adoption of email communication, and little adherence to recognized guidelines for email correspondence. Further efforts are required to educate both patients and physicians on the advantages and limitations of email communication, and to remove fiscal and legal barriers to its adoption.

Architecture for Knowledge-Based and Federated Search of Online Clinical Evidence
A trial was performed to evaluate the technical performance of a federated evidence retrieval system, which provided access to eight distinct online resources, including e-journals, PubMed, and electronic guidelines. The Quick Clinical system architecture utilized a universal query language to reformulate queries internally and utilized meta-search filters to optimize search strategies across resources. The relatively small system overhead compared to the average time it takes to perform a search for an individual source shows that the system achieves a good trade-off between performance and reliability. Furthermore, despite the additional effort required to incorporate the capabilities of each individual source (to improve the quality of search results), system maintenance requires only a small additional overhead. (Ed. Until we have a means of creating a unified index of all these key content resources, systems like this will be our best answer.)

An intervention to overcome clinical inertia and improve diabetes mellitus control in a primary care setting: Improving Primary Care of African Americans with Diabetes
In a 3-year trial, 345 internal medicine residents were randomized to be controls or to receive computerized reminders providing patient-specific recommendations at each visit and/or feedback on performance every 2 weeks. When glucose levels exceeded 150 mg/dL (8.33 mmol/L) during visits of 4038 patients, health care provider behavior was characterized as did nothing, did anything (any intensification of therapy), or did enough (if intensification met recommendations). . During the trial, intensification increased more in the feedback alone and feedback plus reminders groups than for reminders alone and control groups (P<.001).

A Phone, computer convergence promises healthcare on-the-go
At the conference there was a peal-and-stick sensor to monitor heart rates, technology that monitors vital signs and respiration rates, robots, and a handset that analyzes EKG patterns and sends the information to a call center. “The processing power of phones are about to converge with computers.” “For the majority of the world, the cell phone is the only computer people will own.