Innovation, influence and business in America's medical cities.

I’ve just finished my day in Atlanta and am beginning a commute to Tokyo.Every year, I describe my top 10 impressions from HIMSS. Here’s my summary of the event for 20101. Meaningful Use is everywhere. Vendors are promising EHRs, modules, appliances, and services to help clinicians [...]

Last year’s federal stimulus seems to be pushing up health IT adoption among small-practice doctors, exactly as backers intended. A recent poll of 1,000 doctors shows that currently just 15 percent use electronic medical records, yet 58 percent say they will within two years.

Ohio State University spent $703 million on research and development in fiscal 2008, making it the 10th-largest research college in the country and seventh-largest among public universities, according to the National Science Foundation, the Columbus Dispatch reported.

Hyland Software Inc. has acquired eWebHealth Inc., a provider of Web-based medical record workflow software, for undisclosed terms.It was the second announcement on Monday by a Northeast Ohio organization at HIMSS10, the health information technology industry’s annual conference, which is in Atlanta this week. Earlier in the day, the Cleveland Clinic announced results of its [...]

For all the benefits of electronic medical records, they have led to what one Cleveland physician calls an “egregious problem”: The practice of copying and pasting information in patients’ charts. Dr. Sarah Augustine, associate chief of medicine at the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center, said the practice–seen by busy residents as a time-saver–has the potential to perpetuate mistakes. So she and her colleagues are trying to put an end to it.

The nonprofit, state-sponsored group that has been charged with promoting electronic health records adoption in Ohio has received a $43 million federal grant. The grant to the Ohio Health Information Partnership comes from last year’s federal stimulus act and is part of $1 billion in recently announced federal funding for health information technology.

Nonprofit health information exchange HealthBridge has received a $1.4 million contract from the Social Security Administration to provide electronic medical records to the government agency. In addition, Dayton’s Center for Healthy Communities received a $999,000 grant as part of the same project.

Ironwood Pharmaceuticals, expected to go public sometime this week, is looking to pull off the biggest biotech initial public offering in years. And that’s gotten the attention of the entire industry, hoping that a successful offering will be a signal of good, and lucrative, things to come.

People who don’t follow the health industry closely frequently wonder why more doctors don’t use electronic medical records systems. After all, information technology has helped most industries increase efficiency, wouldn’t it do the same for health care if doctors would just do the same?

Apple has finally drawn back the curtains on its Tablet, er, iPad so what will it mean for health care? The short answer is, of course, “It’s too early to tell.” The long answer is, well, maybe not as much as we’d hoped.