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The primary care specialties would be more financially and politically competitive if they merged into a single specialty, according to the associate dean of an Illinois medical school.

More physicians who responded to a late October poll on a social networking web site for doctors appear to favor presidential candidate Senator John McCain's (R-Arizona) stance on health care issues such as government regulation and the shortage of primary care physicians, while his opponent Senator Barack Obama (D-Illinois) drew a more negative reaction.

The CCHIT wants to launch a certification program for PHRs, such as Google Health and applications under Microsoft's Health Vault platform, by mid-2009.

Are your patients satisfied with their visits? In four rural Georgia medical offices, patients leaving their family practice will be able to voice their opinion about communication with their doctor at an electronic touch-screen kiosk developed by researchers at the Medical College of Georgia School of Medicine.

Software companies such as Microsoft and Adobe have publicly battled illegal copies of their well-known office and design computer programs for years, but historically, health-care software providers haven?t been as vocal about copyright infringement. But that doesn't mean the industry was unaffected by software piracy.

Planning any holiday-season electronic health record systems shopping? A key standards-setting health information technology nonprofit has some recommendations about where you may want to start.

The Medical Group Management Association criticized a Medicare quality reporting initiative, complaining that the program doesn't provide guidance on how to improve patient outcomes and creates an administrative burden on practices.

The model of charging patients "access" fees to cover administrative expenses has given way to the concept of "concierge" or "boutique" practices.

The Department of Health and Human Services will require health care providers to use its set of new diagnosis and procedure codes known as ICD-10 by October 2011.

Health-care IT seems to be the new issue du jour for Congress. On Sept. 15, Rep. Pete Stark (D-California), the namesake of the anti-kickback medical referral law, unveiled a bill to establish a nationwide health-care IT infrastructure, but the measure faces competition from two other similar bills already under consideration.