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I spoke recently with Dr. Thomas Jones, chairman of the Health Record Bank's Principles Committee, who will be presenting at the Healthcare and Information Management Systems Society annual conference in February in Orlando, Fla.

I'm often asked how healthcare reform will impact IT planning and implementation over the next few years.

Coming off of my Facebook-focused blog from yesterday, I'll turn to the recent leak of State Dept. documents on WikiLeaks.

Newt Gingrich and Dr. Kamal Thapar wrote an interesting opinion piece in AOL News on Monday, Dec. 6th, about electronic medical information.

The University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics implemented an online patient portal for seven of its departments in July 2010. To date, 35 percent of the patients have accessed their medical information through the portal.

What with many healthcare entities already so far behind on both HIPAA 5010 and ICD-10 implementations as to render industry timelines almost worthless, WEDI and NCHICA reworked their recommendation.

While the United States was enjoying its national Thanksgiving holiday last Thursday, officials of London, Ontario, hospitals were busy putting out the fires created by an IT architect who blew the whistle on outsourcing talks with U.S.-based Cerner Corp.

In pinning down the reason Canada has been slow to adopt EMRs in an interview with a Canadian newspaper, Richard Alvarez, president and CEO of Canada Health Infoway, pointed to a lack of collaboration among the many stakeholders. He’s absolutely right.

There's an interesting article in a recent issue of the Connecticut Mirror about the impact of EMRs on the patient-doctor relationship. It starts out with one patient telling a solo-practicing general surgeon that she's glad the surgeon doesn't have an EMR because the physicians spend more time on the computer than with the patient.

Tom Carter, a vice president at Kaiser Permanente, penned an opinion piece last week, discussing the benefits of EMRs. Carter's argument, however, is touting EMRs' business case for businesses - not healthcare providers.