Author: Dissent

Michelle Andrews of U.S. News and World Report writes: If identity thieves were to disregard your financial accounts and instead target your medical information, your first thought might well be, “Take my medical identity. Please.” What nut would want your high cholesterol, trick knee and family history of Alzheimer’s? The answer is simple: One without…

Ellen Nakashima and Rick Weiss write in the Washington Post: A government laptop computer containing sensitive medical information on 2,500 patients enrolled in a National Institutes of Health study was stolen in February, potentially exposing seven years’ worth of clinical trial data, including names, medical diagnoses and details of the patients’ heart scans. The information…

Bill Toland writes in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: […] American hospitals and doctors have been slow to wholly adopt digital record-keeping and transmitting technology. They spend billions of dollars on the latest MRI machines and CT scanners, and plenty more on billing, scheduling, payroll and so on. Hospitals, obviously, are generally teeming with computers. Why, then,…

Seen at Health Data Management: A consortium of eight large employers, including Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., is slowly moving forward with plans to provide their employees with personal health records. The Dossia employer consortium, based in Portland, Ore., is testing aspects of the infrastructure, linking data from insurers, pharmacies and other sources to a central repository,…

Kathleen Kingsbury had an article in TIME on March 17th: The complex field of health-care information may soon be a little more streamlined. On Tuesday, Chicago-based electronic medical records provider Allscripts announced it has agreed to merge with British rival Misys PLC in a cash-and-stocks deal worth more than $1 billion. The new firm, which…

Think about how wonderful the ability to send a discharge summary by email to a patient straight from your EMR. I think it’s pretty easy to see the tremendous benefits of this type of communication. Send the patient information to one place they probably visit every day and where they can read and process the…