Four Preview Videos in the Footer
Nuance Paying 35 Million for the Acquisition of Zi – Canada
Zi is in Canada and competes with the mobile area of VOP with express and simplified entry of text information for mobile units. This is another major acquisition for Nuance who has purchased several related and competitive companies in the last couple years. BD Burlington, MA-based Nuance …
Merck Contributes Pharma Data to a new Non Profit Public Domain
The site is up, but not much there yet, but it’s a good start. With all the additional pressure facing big pharma today and the expense of bringing new drugs and treatments to market, this is a good sign to begin sharing and besides that, if it is open source and available to all, there’s not much…
Concerned over Wall Street CEO Pay – How About Health Insurance CEOs?
One more time I go back to the 2 hottest words in health care today: Algorithms and Whistleblowers, where the money seems to be: The 2 New Hot Words in Healthcare: Algorithms and Whistleblowers Both Wall Street and the Health Insurance Industry invested heavily with technology early on, and one …
Scientists gather to chart out a 'total reboot' for medicine – Science and Medicine Coming Together
In the discussions, both Plavix and Erbitux are mentioned as both drugs do not work on 30-40% of patients and the answer eventually will lie in genomics research to find out why. If this is known up front, it would save that population the risk of taking a drug that is not going to work for them. …
Double Vision – Multi Tasking with Video and TV
This is something I ran across that might be of interest, if not just fun and an easy way to watch videos on your computer. You can fade the view to whatever level you want if you want to multi task on a word document, spreadsheet, etc. and watch TV or a movie. There are quite a few television sho…
Vitamin B and Folate fight Migraines – Device in Clinical Trials
More good news for migraine suffers with clinical trial information, it’s not a cure all but helps in the over all occurrences. In other news, a medical device is also offering help with occipital nerve stimulation. “According to the presentation by Joel Saper, M.D., of the Michigan Head Pain and…
US Attorney General Announced Plans to End Raids on Medical Marijuana Dispensaries
This is perhaps good news and the availability to put the use of the DEA enforcement officers into other areas where needed. BD The U.S. Attorney General has announced plans to end raids on medical marijuana dispensaries that are legal under state law. Newly installed U.S. Attorney Genera…
Obama’s Proposed Budget Includes Billions to Bolster FDA — About Time
I have done my share as have most bloggers about what has happened at the FDA, but long and short of it, is we had a little bit of a lack of keeping up with technology. Last year they were blasted by Congress for not even asking for more money over the past 2 years, so again it’s a bit of the old …
Peer to Peer Forensic Services – Enterprise solutions for Hospitals and other Health Agencies
Last week I had posted about Peer to Peer networks and medical information being shared. Most of this can be controlled through use of “Group Policy” and Active Directory with Microsoft products. It is not a bad idea a well to use a forensic service to check and see what is out there as well. Man…
My Drug is Better than Your Drug – Prostate Cancer
The FDA is up in arms about the drug stating it is the only one that shrinks the prostate gland, when in fact there are a couple other alternatives. The FDA has asked Glaxo to stop with commercials of such and stick to relaying the information about the drug without entrenching on competitive bord…
Medicare Advantage Plans Stand to see some substantial decreases from the Government
Payments to insurers that provide Medicare Advantage plans are determined by a formula or algorithm. The Two hot words in healthcare today: The 2 New Hot Words in Healthcare: Algorithms and Whistleblowers This is related to Medicare Advantage plans, which have been a huge source of profit and th…
Melanoma Drug Fails – Small Biotech Company Cancer Drug Research Halted
A higher death rate can certainly end the research. The drug, elesclomol was targeted to pretty much make cancer cells self destruct. It did slow down the tumor growth, but the death rate, and reasons there of, are still unknown, thus the study was stopped. GlaxoSmithKline had already committe…
Implant to Treat Obstructive Sleep Apnea – Inspire Medical Systems
Invasion of the implants – this one for Sleep Apnea and the patient will have a device to turn the device off and on. If you have looked around You Tube you can find individuals who have made videos of what they are like with an implanted unit turned off and on and these are pretty much patients w…
EHR Vendors Testing Open Source HIE Software prior to HIMMS Convention in April
The California HealthCare Foundation donated open source software components for master patient index and records locator applications to Open Health Tools. This is another go at the project. I have been posting quite a bit about hospital connectivity, and the vendors listed here are working on a…
Like the commercials, I’m a Mac, I’m a PC…from Teva Drugs, the all encompassing generic and biosimiliar drug company. BD ";" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/_v3zjJigoAPE/SaeiLdFoXDI/AAAAAAAAOfc/l7pr2hvT5bE/video96da79c06de8%5B2%5D.jpg?imgmax=800" style="border-style: none"> Source: Peter Rost for …
Lung Cancer Expert from Harvard goes to New Yale Cancer Center – Focus on Personalized Medicine and Cancer
October is the planned date to open the Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven, 500,000 square-foot, 14-story hospital. Genomic studies and sequencing are right in the plan. The facility will use molecular profiling to match therapy to the genetic signature of the patient’s tumor. This falls …
Steve Shihadeh, VP Microsoft Health Solutions Group – The Amalga Software Solution for Aggregating Hospital Information (Interview)
This week, I spoke with Steve Shihadeh, vice president, Microsoft Health Solutions Group, about the software solutions offered to help hospitals view information and communicate for better patient medical care. This is a good opportunity to take a look at what can be accomplished and what the Amalg…
Competitive Technologies to Begin Selling Pain Therapy Medical Device – Oncology Centers
Primarily the focus will be all the major oncology centers in the US, over 3000 patients have been treated in Europe. The product can be an alternative to drugs in some cases. A biophysical approach uses a multi-processor able to simultaneously treat multiple pain areas by applying surface ele…
Hospital to Implement the New Microsoft Amalga HIS 2009 – Malaysia
The press release below discusses an installation of Amalga HIS solution, which is primarily marketed outside the US in developing countries, where as the Unified Intelligence System is sold in the US to allow hospitals to integrate aggregated information to have patient data available to read and…
Tenet Healthcare Posts 33 Million 4th Quarter Loss – Charge on Sale of USC Hospitals
Tenet appears to be shrinking in size, there were 5 other hospitals sold in the Los Angeles area last year as well. BD U.S. hospital operator Tenet Healthcare Corp. reported a $33 million fourth-quarter loss, mostly reflecting a charge on the sale of two hospitals. Dallas-based Tenet said…
OctoMom worried the Hospital Won’t Release the babies to go home – Calls Dr. Phil
I knew somehow Dr. Phil was going to get involved here, just had that feeling. Actually her father now is talking on Oprah about here sanity, which is probably something we all are beginning to wonder about at this time. Her mother has not been too complimentary since day one as well, very interesti…
