Paying doctors to use digital records — Medicare finally does the right thing
Digital health records would be a great thing for the U.S. healthcare system, should doctors and hospitals ever adopt them widely. (Among other things, they’d likely cut down on medical errors and improve the quality of medical care.) Yet only about 10 percent of smaller… Continue Reading
Review of a preview: Google Health
(UPDATED: See below.)
No sooner does the NYT run a significant piece on health-info efforts at Google and Microsoft than someone decides to leak the “preview” of the site to Google Blogoscoped. (Site author Philipp Lenssen confirms that it wasn’t an authorized disclosure.)
Based on the ten screenshots… Continue Reading
Google vs. Microsoft in healthcare records
(UPDATED: See below.)
Venture capitalists are throwing scads of money at online health-information startups, figuring that at least one of them might eventually emerge a powerhouse in community-building, health-related search, electronic medical records, or even some combination of the three. Today, the NYT’s Steve Lohr weighs in… Continue Reading
Roundup: Biogenerics bill in limbo, clashing data on health IT benefits, the RNAi boom, and more
House-Senate confrontation set over biogenerics – Late last month, a key group of senators reached agreement on legislative provisions that would authorize copycat versions of biotech drugs, which are typically complex proteins manufactured by genetically engineered cells (see details here and here). These provisions would finally… Continue Reading
HealthCare.com joins the online-healthcare stampede, raises $6.1M
(UPDATED with additional information on the fundraising, venture interest in the online healthcare-info sector, and a note of caution about these new ventures.)
You can’t swing a dead cat among venture businesses these days without hitting a new online site devoted to healthcare information of one sort… Continue Reading
Andy Grove’s placebo pill for U.S. healthcare
Having survived prostate cancer and now facing a mild form of Parkinson’s disease, former Intel chairman Andy Grove has turned his analytical eye on the increasingly dysfunctional U.S. healthcare system.
Unfortunately, his recommendations are disappointingly small-scale and reflective of the inordinate faith that many high-tech aficionados… Continue Reading