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Once it allows employees and clinicians in its hospitals to start using iPhones and iPads on the job on Oct. 1, the biggest issue for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is information security.Employees will be able to view sensitive data, but be unable to download and store information on a mobile device unless it meets security requirements. The viewer tool is a capability that VA has utilized for other devices, such as employees' home computers, said Roger Baker, VA CIO.

The Global Health Delivery Project has released 21 teaching case studies that examine the complexity of bringing life-saving technologies and care to resource-poor settings around the world.These multidisciplinary materials, which include case studies from 13 countries, are available to global health educators, students and practitioners at no cost through Harvard Business Publishing.

Mac McMillan, CEO of Austin, Texas-based IT security firm CynergisTek and chair of the HIMSS Privacy & Security Policy Task Force, has some strong opinions about privacy protections in healthcare nowadays. The short version Things could be a lot better.You've said that if any other industry had this many privacy and security breaches, "heads would be rolling." What is wrong with healthcare Is the information landscape just too complicated Or is it a matter of culture

EMR and mobile medical app companies have little to fear concerning the guidelines put out by the FDA, according to healthcare market research firm Kalorama Information.Kalorama, which studies mobile medical app markets, previously estimated an $84 million market for mobile medical apps and expects accelerated growth rates in this segment of the mobile apps industry.

The Center for Technology and Aging, with funding from The SCAN Foundation, is investing a total of $477,150 in one-year grants among five organizations that will demonstrate the best ways to implement mobile health (mHealth) technologies for older adults with chronic health conditions.

Social media such as Facebook, Twitter and foursquare may be important keys to improving the public health system's ability to prepare for, respond to and recover from disasters, according to an article in the New England Journal of Medicine.From earthquakes to oil spills and other industrial accidents to weather-related events like heat waves and flooding, the authors suggest that harnessing crowd-sourcing technologies and electronic communications tools will set the stage to handle emergencies in a quicker, more coordinated, more effective way.