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Twitter can be used to track important health trends, according to computer scientists at Johns Hopkins University. Mark Dredze and Michael J. Paul fed two billion public tweets posted between May 2009 and October 2010 into computers, then used software to filter out the 1.5 million messages that referred to health matters. Dredze, a researcher at the university's Human Language Technology Center of Excellence and an assistant research professor of computer science, and Paul, a doctoral student, said identities of the tweeters were not collected.

Critical access hospitals (CAHs) in rural areas of the U.S. are behind on quality of care, patient outcomes and technology adoption when compared to other hospitals, according to a recent study. In the first national study to examine care at CAHs in rural areas of the U.S., Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers found that, despite more than a decade of policy efforts to improve rural health care, substantial challenges remain.

Websites are "the new storefront" these days, and medical practices should not be missing out on the opportunity, says one expert. However, he points out that they "are a constant evolution," and so it's important to "lay the right foundation."Mike Cuesta, director of marketing at CareCloud, a Web-based medical practice management software firm in Miami, offered some tips for medical practices when it comes to creating and maintaining websites.