By JOHN GOODMAN I have been watching the release of the Medicare Trustees reports for many years and I have never seen anything as strange as what happened last week. Although these reports are normally carefully embargoed, Health and Human...

By Rob Lamberts, MD Dr. Wes (a cardiology blogger who all should read) wrote a very compelling post about technology and the bondage it can create for doctors.: The devaluation of doctors’ time continues unabated. As we move into our...

By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE Every day millions of Americans and billions of people around the globe are routinely accepting colorful pieces of paper in return for their labor and placing those hard earned possessions in modern glass buildings whose owners they...

By PAUL LEVY Google recently announced that it was abandoning Wave, a multimedia social media collaboration tool. I'm sorry about this, as I thought it had great potential. That being said, I never used it, so perhaps I was typical....

By JONATHAN BUSH Recently, I got to shake hands with and also have lunch with doctor-writer extraordinaire Atul Gawande! He was nearly everything I had made him out to be. He wore a snappy blue blazer, a jumble of ID...

By DAVID WILLIAMS Mark Perry draws an interesting inference from two news stories: a WSJ article that suggests consumers are using less health care and another that reports a big jump in MinuteClinic volumes. Consumers aren’t necessarily consuming less health...

By THOMAS GOETZ Though the prospect of learning about our DNA might seem wrapped in mystery and intrigue, genetic information is not so different from any other metrics we know about ourselves: Our age, our weight, our blood pressure. With...

By MICHAEL LAKE This is a summary of the HIT Trends Report for June 2010. You can get the current issue here. E-prescribing. Two surveys re-confirm that while e-prescribing adoption is rapidly increasing, utilization continues to lag, particularly with advanced...

By JOHN C. GOODMAN Are the nation’s polltakers part of a surreptitious plot to convince us that what’s good for us is bad and what’s bad is good? A new Harris poll is the third in the space of a...

We caught up with Adam Bosworth, CEO of Keas this week who had some new updates on the Keas API challenge including the open authoring environment and a new feature which will allow for more social engagement on the site....

By BOB WACHTER, MD I thought I was an oddball in college. I've only recently learned that I was avant-garde. Right before beginning college in 1975, I decided I wanted to be a doctor. Being the first-born son – with...

By MICHAEL L. MILLENSON Report cards are back in the news. The Washington Post (via Kaiser Health News) is warning about the difficulty of rating individual physicians. Meanwhile, spokesmen for the insurance industry and the doctor industry (a/k/a the American...

BY KATHERINE MATOS On July 22, the Obama Administration released interim final rules that allow patient appeals of health insurance coverage decisions as required under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (”PPACA”) and Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act...

By Bianca Grogan At the Health 2.0 Goes to Washington Conference, June 7, 2010, Trisha Torrey who writes the Guide to Patient Empowerment for About.com, gave a backstage interview. She mentioned how excited she was to be at the conference...

By HERBERT MATHEWSON I’m sure that many of us “old timers” can remember the early days of computer implementation in our hospitals. At that time you couldn’t help but notice the dozens (or more) Yellow Stickies plastering the nurses’ station...

By JOHN MOORE The Health Information Exchange (HIE) market is the Wild West right now. Vendors are telling us that theyre seeing an unprecedented level of activity both for private and public HIEs. Private HIEs are being set-up by large...

By MERRILL GOOZNER Check out this study from the Healthcare Performance Management Institute, a business-backed think tank that promotes self-insurance among employers. The survey claims that insurance companies are refusing to provide employers with detailed data about employee claims, citing...

By Bianca Grogan Health 2.0 In the Doctor's Office: Tom McHale gave a brief demonstration about CarePass and its services. He explained that CarePass is all about simplifying the administrative side of healthcare and this version notifies patients about real...

By Matthew Holt Subtext: Interview with Gilles Frydman, Founder and President of ACOR, at the Health 2.0 Goes to Washington Conference, June 7, 2010. ACOR is an online community for cancer patients.