News

Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Inc., is urging healthcare leaders to use healthcare information technology to improve the efficiency and quality of care and to support future innovations in prevention, wellness and personalized medicine.

A new tool from Boston-based UbiCare aims to provide a look at the U.S. healthcare industry's use of Facebook and fan engagement. UbiCare's Engagement Quotient (EQ) Chart looks at activity on more than 900 hospital and healthcare-associated Facebook pages and offers a measurement of fan interaction with those pages. Each week, these pages will be ranked by success in engaging fans, using key data such as posts, likes, comments and links sourced from Facebook, all of which are then factored against the pages' fan bases.

A new report by SmartPersonalHealth reveals that interoperability is a significant challenge for the personal health solutions market. The report, titled "Enabling smart integrated care: Recommendations for fostering greater interoperability of personal health systems," offers ideas for creating interoperable personal health systems.

According to a recent survey of U.S. physicians, 61 percent intend to own an iPhone by the end of 2011. This is up from 39 percent at the beginning of the year and compares with the iPhone's 24.7 percent adoption among general U.S. smartphone users.

In this new social media environment researchers and clinicians need to engage more actively with the public to articulate the importance of science in determining the benefits and harm of novel treatments and to ensure that patients' concerns and priorities are heard, according to new study published in Nature.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has contracted with F4W, Inc. for its core communication systems. The systems will be placed at VA's twelve Emergency Management Strategic Healthcare Group (EMSHG) regional offices nationwide, providing VA with secure, resilient communications in the event of natural disasters and other emergencies.

The National eHealth Collaborative (NeHC) on April 26 convened 80 representatives of consumer-facing organizations ranging from patient advocates to government agencies for the inaugural meeting of the Consumer Consortium on eHealth. The goal: To encourage individuals to become more engaged in health and healthcare throught the use of information technology.