health care - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• The grill: Charles E. Christian

  Charles E. Christian got his start in healthcare in the clinical arena, working in radiology before moving into IT. Today he's CIO of Good Samaritan Hospital, a 232-bed community facility in Vincennes, Ind., with 1,600 employees. Christian, 57, has become a leader in healthcare through his work at Good Samaritan for the past 22 years and through his service on various policy and advocacy committees. In January, he was recognized as the 2010 John E. Gall Jr. CIO of the Year by the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, which jointly bestow the award on healthcare IT executives who make significant contributions to their organizations and demonstrate innovative leadership through effective use of technology.

• Study: Virtual medicine as effective as physical doc visits

  Results of a five-year study on telemedicine showed that patients can be treated virtually by physicians as effectively as if the patients made physical visits to the doctor's office. In another finding, the remote treatment also improved doctor-patient communications.

• Remote-controlled nanoparticles target cancer

  Researchers at a Canadian university are using nanotechnology and a tiny remote-controlled magnetic sphere to deliver cancer-fighting drugs directly to where they need to go.

• Cebit kicks off with talk of openness

  Open democracy, open borders and open standards were the themes to which speakers returned again and again at the opening ceremony for the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany, on Monday night.

• Researchers create computer that fits on a pen tip

  Researchers at the University of Michigan today announced they have created the first prototype for a millimeter-scale computing system that can hold up to a week's worth of data when implanted in something as small as a human eye.

• Study finds mobile phone stirs brain cells

  A new federal study finds that holding a cell phone to your ear for a sustained period of time does cause temporary changes to your brain, though it's unclear whether the impact is good, bad or neutral.

• Hospitals kill the fax and exchange health data over the Internet

  Health-care facilities in two states have begun exchanging data with each other and public health agencies over the Internet as part of a pilot program that standardizes the way patient information is transmitted. The goal is to speed up data transmission and to track public health trends, the U.S. Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) announced today.

• Cisco eschews cloud services - for now

  Cisco's cloud strategy encompasses pretty much everything under the sun save one - actual cloud services.

• Rugged handhelds announced by Motorola

  Motorola announced two rugged Wi-Fi-ready mobile computers Tuesday for use in retail, manufacturing and health care.

• The Grill: Dieterich Lawson

  The young and charismatic chief technology officer at FrontlineSMS:Medic, Dieterich Lawson, 21, is committed to his company's mission of using low-cost mobile technologies to advance healthcare networks in underserved communities. Combining the use of inexpensive cell phones with free, open-source software, Lawson and FrontlineSMS:Medic are helping to better organize healthcare records and connect patients with doctors in rural areas around the world.

• One enterprise's two-year Apple mobile makeover

  RehabCare CIO Dick Escue's journey to become a mobile enterprise Apple shop started two years ago, and now he's developing critical iOS apps for some 8,000 iPod Touches, 700 iPhones and 120 iPads. All tallied, three iOS apps will touch every facet of RehabCare's business, from improving patient care to winning new business.

• When and how to deploy e-health records tech

  Over the next two years, 58 per cent of small physician practices plan to roll out electronic health records. And by 2014, the US Federal Government wants more than half of all healthcare facilities to use EHRs.

• Dell offering first encryption product

  Dell Wednesday announced its first endpoint encryption product, along with the possibility of factory installation on certain Dell PCs.

• 500 million people will be using mobile health apps by 2015

  Smartphone apps are set to become the killer health care product as a research report projects that some 500 million people will be using them within five years.

• Complexity of IT systems will be our undoing

  Roger Sessions, CTO of ObjectWatch and an expert in software architecture, argues that the increasing complexity of our IT systems will be our undoing.  In fact, he just recently got a patent for a methodology that helps deal with complex IT systems. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently caught up with Sessions to get his take on the extent of the problem and possible solutions.