BIOETHICS

Letter from Oxford: Health Care is Not Tyranny

The ultimate approach to health care must be cultural and moral as well as technical: What do we owe each other?

Paving the Way for Personalized Medicine

There are promising developments heralding the arrival of personalized medicine, a new medical field where the results of genetic tests or other biomarker assessments are used to tailor drugs and treatments to individual patients.

Web Tools Afford Patients Active Role in Research

Sarah Arnquist, reporting for The New York Times, tells a moving personal story that captures the hope permeating some of the projects now breaking down barriers between patients, research participants, and scientists. Her hook is the quest of Amy Farber, [...]

PUBLIC HEALTH

Searching for Outbreaks

Digital technologies are changing the world of public health, and officials are just now exploring the best ways to incorporate these new tools into older systems of disease detection and medical research. Looking ahead, the nationwide switch to digital health records has enormous implications for public health—but not just for the reasons most people are talking about.

HEALTH IT

Connected Health, Connected Reform

Experience at the Center for Connected Health presents policymakers with clear evidence that comprehensive health care reform can deliver better quality care at a lower cost.

AP Tells the Story of a Health IT Success

Some discussions of the benefits of electronic health records can sound abstract and stats-based. Only 13 percent of physicians currently use even a basic EHR; 1.5 percent of hospitals responding to a recent survey published in the New England of [...]

Protecting Data in the Event of a Breach

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s $19 billion investment in health information technology is crucial to improving U.S. health care quality and value, as explained in a CAP report released earlier this week. But in addition to creating a business [...]

Data Bank: Health Information Technology

Implementing meaningful, effective health information technology throughout the nation’s health care system is not a technical problem. Rather, the lack of current health IT infrastructure results from the absence of a business case for such improvements, according to Todd Park [...]

HEALTH CARE

Cure Cancer? Not Without a Course Correction

The “war on cancer” devotes too much in search of new cures and too little to understanding the results of existing oncology therapies.

HEALTH IT

Web of Care

A physician and ethicist observes that electronic medical records can act as public documents in the context of the local medical community where one’s local reputation as a clinician is forged. With them, all care is now witnessed, open to local peer review: others can read what I write and assess its content, clinical judgment, and quality.

HEALTH CARE

Harnessing Complex Hospital Care

Our health care system needs a systems-based approach to excellence in the care of hospitalized patients to ensure efficiency, empathy and the highest quality medical treatments.