Health Level Seven International's (HL7) next generation standards framework is progressing and will be balloted as a Draft Standard for Trial Use.

Hospitals have made only incremental progress on errors, accidents, injuries and infections impacting patients, according to the spring 2013 update to the Leapfrog Group's Hospital Safety Score.

“We’ve put the technology infrastructure in place, but now we need to move forward, and we need people knowledgeable in making the small adjustments to make health IT successful,” said Larry Wolf, health IT strategist, Kindred Healthcare, and co-chair of the Health IT Workforce Development subgroup, at the Office of the National Health IT Coordinator’s (ONC’s) Health IT Policy Committee meeting on May 7.

CAMBRIDGE, MASS.—While there are “depressing challenges facing healthcare,” there is reason for optimism, said Alan Russell, PhD, Highmark Distinguished Career Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh. Russell spoke during the Institute of Health Technology Transformation’s Boston Health IT Summit.

Telemedicine must move to the forefront of medical efforts to achieve better than "marginal" improvement in efficiency and quality, according to an editorial published in Telemedicine and e-Health.

NORWALK, Conn., May 7, 2013  -- America has a serious drug problem, but it's not the one you think. A new survey commissioned by HealthPrize Technologies, a digital health company, found that 47 percent of people would rather take out the trash than take their prescribed medications, demonstrating how strongly Americans dislike taking their meds. More than a quarter of people (27 percent) would rather get a shot than take their prescribed medication and 10 percent would rather have a cavity filled.

Can a physician adequately serve multiple patients—in four or more different locations—in the same morning? Andrew R. Watson, MD, MLitt, FACS, knows the answer is yes because he has done it. Executive director of telemedicine for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), and a practicing colorectal surgeon, Watson has found that his real world experience prepares him well for the naysayers—but patients are not among the skeptics.

Hospital IT leaders generally agree on IT infrastructure priorities but have varying approaches to addressing network scalability, executive support and viability of cloud computing to secure data, according to a May 6 HIMSS Analytics and Comcast Business report.