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President Obama announced Friday a $795 million government program to develop broadband access in rural parts of the country. Among the beneficiaries will be 900 healthcare facilities.The investment will support 66 new Recovery Act broadband projects nationwide that, according to the grantees, will not only directly create approximately 5,000 jobs up front, but will also help spur economic development in some of the nation's hardest-hit communities, helping create jobs for years to come.

IBM and the University of Missouri (MU) announced an initiative on Friday that, by empowering the school's bioinformatics projects with IBM's high performance computing technologies, aims to develop a first-of-a-kind cloud computing environment for genomics research collaboration at a regional level.

The technology underlying the electronic health record and the electronic medical record seems to be significantly driven by sales to a perceived market. That market is controlled by parameters designed to report data to regulatory agencies and insurance companies, rather than to increasing the interactivity and effectiveness of actual professional medical care decision making for individual patients. The importance of interoperability, portability and other standards of data collection and use cannot be overemphasized.

A new survey shows that while the medical management industry continues to focus resources on health IT, consumers are hampered in accessing their information online due to the cost of developing Web portals and other business- and security-related concerns.Conducted by URAC, a nationwide healthcare accreditation organization, "The URAC 2010 Population Health/Care Management Survey" is the third in a series of studies of medical management organizations meant to periodically assess industry trends and identify potential issues for the near future.