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To achieve meaningful use of health information technology, physician practices must increase the use of quality measurement as part of their electronic health records systems, according to a paper recently released by the American College of Physicians.

Physician practices large and small are being herded into the panacea of the electronic health record. However, why do we tolerate a physician "texting" when he or she is examining a patient?

Do you tweet? Do your patients? Social networking via Twitter and other means could be a way to disseminate correct information and improve behavior related to the use of antibiotics, but it also might lead to confusion or the sharing of inaccurate information, contend the authors of research recently published in the American Journal of Infection Control.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has launched a new online tool that highlights and compares national, regional, state, and local community data on the use of preventive services among adults aged 50 to 64 years in an effort to help healthcare professionals and others increase knowledge and use of preventive care services.

Regional health information organizations must provide leadership and financial incentives if more comprehensive, community-wide use of health information exchange is to occur, according to research recently published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Physicians who practice at facilities at which electronic health record systems are used have a high prevalence of computer-associated upper extremity musculoskeletal symptoms, according to research recently published in Archives of Internal Medicine.

Home telemonitoring plus active medication management by a nurse practitioner resulted in greater reductions in A1C than did a monthly care coordination telephone call in patients with type 2 diabetes in a study reported in the March issue of Diabetes Care.

A new white paper released by the Department of Health and Human Services? Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology highlights five options and recommends additional research in relation to consumer consent possibilities for electronic health information exchange.

Remote monitoring reduced the median time to clinical decision compared with standard in-office follow-up for patients with cardiac resynchronization therapy defibrillators or implantable cardioverter-defibrillators, according to results of the prospective Clinical Evaluation of Remote Notification to Reduce Time to Clinical Decision trial recently released during the American College of Cardiology annual meeting.

The United States ranks in the bottom half among comparable countries in almost every metric used to measure the adoption of health information technology, according to the National Broadband Plan recently delivered to Congress by the Federal Communications Commission.

The state of Louisiana has launched a new website, www.healthfinderla.gov, in an effort to give residents easy access to detailed, accurate information on how to live more healthful lives.

The use of at-home medical devices to connect doctors and patients via the Internet can help patients and their physicians work together more efficiently to manage some chronic conditions, according to results of a pilot project that paired the Cleveland Clinic?s electronic health records (EHR) system with Microsoft?s online HealthVault service.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has awarded more than $2.4 million to five grantee teams to test whether and how information?such as the stress levels of caregivers of premature infants and medication-taking routines of senior citizens at risk of cognitive decline ? can be collected, interpreted, and acted on by clinicians and patients in real-world clinical settings.

The HITECH Act was swept into law as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. It affects many aspects of your HIPAA compliance and means increased enforcement and harsher penalties for violators. Here's what you need to know.

The concept of ?meaningful use,? together with an improving economy, appears to be spurring an increase in healthcare information technology spending, suggest recently released results of the 21st annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Leadership Survey.

To close the broadband connectivity gap that exists among healthcare practices, the Federal Communications Commission is proposing transforming its Rural Health Care Program, which is authorized to spend $400 million per year, to help healthcare delivery locations meaningfully use health information technology.