By Matthew Holt Today at 12 noon PST Aneesh Chopra, Federal CTO will be at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco talking about health care and health care IT. Indu and I saw him last night talking about technology before...

By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE All the laws have been passed and all the final rulings have been published. In the spirit of the times, you went out and got yourself an EHR. You did your due diligence and sat through many...

By JOHN GOODMAN The release of this year’s Medicare Trustees report was unprecedented. As noted in previous posts here and at my blog here and here, Medicare’s chief actuary not only refused to sign off on it, he disowned it...

Last week, we sat down with Steve Downs, Assistant Vice President, Health Group, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to discuss the 3 New Challenges they've announced for the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge. Steve explains RWJF's current areas of focus in health...

By Matthew Holt Unplatforms is the term I've been using to describe the multitude of devices that people are using to collect and receive information. And also to cover the different channels they are using often on the same device...

By DAID HARLOW The Queen of Soul famously wailed about being a link in a chain of fools. Today's lead story in the Boston Globe tells us about another sort of link in the chain -- the weakest link in...

By Matthew Holt Saturday's New York Times portends more trouble for big Pharma. The headline is wrapped up in an examination of foreign corrupt practices, but the bigger issue is that clinical trials have hidden serious adverse events. The recent...

By Matthew Holt Ingenix, the arms dealer that's been supplying all sides in the health care information war for the past decade or so, built itself up by buying lots of little companies in the data analytics space. Now it’s...

By DAVID ERICKSON, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and JAMES S. MARKS, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation We all have a vision of the “Main Street” we would like to live near – tree-lined, friendly and safe. But our “Main...

By JANE SARASOHN-KAHN Best Buy is teaming up with Cardiac Science, targeting potential purchasers of electronic health records (EHRs) and noninvasive cardiac devices. The venture looks to take advantage of economic stimulus funding available through the HITECH Act aimed at...

By Matthew Holt Mary Hiller is Executive Director at MedExpert International -- one of the companies behind Safeway's remarkable results in reducing health care costs. The company manages a system that aligns best practices from intensive literature searches (although Mary...

By BOB WACHTER Don’t read this. That is, if you have a limited amount of time for reading today, I’d rather you read Atul Gawande’s essay on end-of-life care in this month’s New Yorker than this blog. But if you...

By KENT BOTTLES, MD Not long ago I was lucky to be invited to a New England Healthcare Institute discussion entitled “From Evidence to Practice: Making Comparative Effectiveness Research Findings Work for Providers and Patients “ in Washington, DC. How...

By ROGER COLLIER I’ve been reading a recent paper from the Committee for Economic Development, one of the less doctrinaire business research groups, that should give health care reform advocates (and opponents) food for thought. " Health Care in California...

By INDU SUBAIYA The Health 2.0 Developer Challenge welcomes its four newest challenges. Yesterday, West Wireless Health Institute, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), the California Healthcare Foundation, the Markle Foundation and the University of Wisconsin released new challenges with prize...

By HERBERT MATHEWSON My last post described how a precisely regimented dosage of intravenous medication delivered to me over six hours by a state-of-the art computer actually depended on the existence (and the survival for 6 hours) of a handwritten...

By DAVID E. WILLIAMS I’m impressed that the Boston Globe printed a number of insightful letters in response to its Mistakes that matter article, which discussed the case of two patients whose prostate cancer biopsies got mixed up. (One had...

By MARGALIT GUR-AIRE One of the most promising uses of Electronic Health Records (EHR) is Research. As EHRs become more and more widespread and the clinical data previously held in silos of paper charts becomes fluid, exchangeable and duly collected,...

The Health 2.0 Northwest Chapter is having its first meeting next week, and it’s a doozie. No starting off with a few drinks in a bar for these guys, they’ve got a serious host (the major Health Science University) and...

By PAUL LEVY Here is one of my occasional updates on the Massachusetts scene, for people looking for hints as to the kind of issues that might arise nationally as health care reform is implemented. I have written several times...