The saying hope for the best and plan for the worst is more than good advice. When hospital servers crash or vital equipment and patient data are underwater, a well-thought-out disaster recovery plan with redundant archiving is crucial to weathering the crisis and getting systems back up and running as quickly as possible. Now a HIPAA requirement, disaster recovery planning enables hospitals to determine their risks and plan for the worst.

Compared with other industries, cloud-based clinical application development has been rather slow. However, as algorithms and computing power ramp up, healthcare providers are finding more choices and expanding capabilities among cloud apps.

Did you know that 10 of the new legislators headed to Capitol Hill next month hail from healthcare backgrounds? And they all ran on the anti-healthcare-reform platform? Even some of the returning senators and representatives who dont want an outright repeal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act want to trim the bad parts of it. Whats to keep HITECH and other IT-related efforts out of the 112th Congress line of fire?

At the University of Michigan, with allergist Mark Morris, MD, we converted regular clinics for severe asthmatics into a disease management program. Caring for patients went from frustration with the amount of time it took to do all of the processespatients waiting in the lobby for long periods of time, then being routed all over the hospital to get lab work to creating a much more compact, home-like setting that allowed us a lot more time to talk with the patient.

Norton Healthcare has partnered with Microsoft to use the companys Amalga Unified Intelligence System and HealthVault systems to aggregate and mine data. The partnership will allow Norton to facilitate an accountable care organization (ACO) initiative in Kentucky and Indiana.

IBM and American Well have expanded a partnership to secure patient information that is collected and exchanged as part of American Wells Online Care consultations with healthcare providers.

At RSNA in Chicago, GE Healthcare today unveiled eHealth Image Exchange software, a standards-based platform for sharing images and integrating workflows.

The U.S. spent more than $6,284 per capita on healthcare in 2007, compared with an average of $2,968 per capita in G-5 countries: Canada, Japan, Germany, the U.K. and France, according to a report from Business Roundtable, an association of U.S. CEOs whose companies provide healthcare.