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 physicians’ offices use them, because the upfront costs of implementing an electronic-records system are so daunting — and because the doctors themselves won’t tend to reap benefits from the investment… 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 available at Lenssen’s site, this preliminary version of Google Health is indeed laser-beam focused on creating a personal electronic health record — a digital version of the paper files your… 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 to argue that the biggest battles in this space might just involve the two familiar names Google and Microsoft.
Of all these opportunities, electronic health records probably have the greatest potential… 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 put biotech drugs — which don’t face cut-rate competition once their key patents expire — on a par with traditional pharmaceuticals, and have been a long time in coming. They’re… 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 or another. Over the last few months, we’ve seen a parade of major announcements — many of them big on vision but vague on particulars — from the likes of… 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 place in technological “fixes” for complex social phenomena. I’ll explain why in a moment.
To Grove’s tremendous credit, he argues in a recent interview with Wired News that the most pressing… Continue Reading