Health care

President Obama announced Wednesday that he is directing nearly $600 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act awards to repair, rebuild, or altogether replace federally designated community health centers across the country, $88 million of which has been earmarked to help digitize medical records.

"These investments won't just increase efficiency and lower costs," Obama told community health leaders with members of Congress at his side. "They'll improve the quality of care as well, preventing countless medical errors and allowing providers to spend less time with paperwork and more time with patients."

The $508.5 … Read more

Insurance companies want us to be healthy. Really, they do. They have our interests at heart, and they defend those interests with an unusual zeal. This is why I am wondering which details might be missing from the tale of Natalie Blanchard.

According to the Associated Press, Blanchard, a 29-year-old IBM employee from Bromont, Quebec, was suffering from depression and took time away from work, relying on sick-leave benefits from her insurer, Manulife Financial.

The monthly payments were suddenly halted. When she called Manulife to ask why, she says she was told that it had espied photos on her Facebook … Read more

Add another robot to the list of helping bots for seniors. A robot named Charlie rolled into a New Zealand retirement village on Monday to take residents' vital signs, deliver their medication reminders, and call for assistance if they fall.

Charlie's trial stint at Selwyn Retirement Village in Auckland's Point Chevalier is, in part, a response to a University of Auckland study exploring seniors' attitudes toward robots.

The study--part of a three-year "HealthBots" collaboration by the University of Auckland and Korea's Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute--collated the opinions of Selwyn Retirement Village residents, their families, and staff on what tasks health care robots could perform and what the mechanical helpers should look like.

Results showed respondents felt most comfortable with robots taking vital signs such as blood pressure, calling for help, lifting heavy objects, cleaning, and making phone calls to a doctor or nurse. They did not identify personal care, medical advice, and assessing emotions as tasks they'd like to see taken over by robots.

As far as physical appearance, residents and staff indicated they preferred a "middle-age robot" with a clear voice, though they didn't have a preference for male or female features. The robot shouldn't be too human-like, they suggested, with some residents explicitly saying they'd rather be tended to by a robot without a face. The preferred design was silver and around 4 feet tall, so the robot was not too imposing, with wheels and a screen.

Enter Charlie, which pretty much fits that description.… Read more

You may not know it, but deep within the ivory towers of hospitals a debate is raging over the future of the doctor's necktie. One company has turned the debate into an opportunity with a tie whose stain-resistant coating actually thwarts microbes.

Much evidence has emerged in recent years that doctors wearing ties might actually cause as much harm to patients as doctors who don't wash their hands. In one 2004 study of 42 doctors and medical staffers at the New York Hospital Medical Center of Queens, almost 50 percent of the neckties were host to bacteria that … Read more

Just in time for the crazed holiday shopping season, San Francisco-based GoodGuide releases the first iPhone app that lets you scan bar codes for what the guide calls "impartial" health, environmental, and social responsibility ratings of not only the products you are scanning but their companies, too.

As our Webware staff wrote in August, "GoodGuide is the reason we have awards for tech services and products: it's a small and relatively unknown service that demonstrates real leadership on the Web." And as we report in Health Tech just this week, GoodGuide is an invaluable resource … Read more

Medpedia, a collaborative project for medical information launched in February, is getting beyond the medical-data basics as it adds answers, alerts, and analysis.

Founded on the noble and semipractical system of providing free online medical information generated for and by physicians, journals, schools, patients, and more, Medpedia's three stated goals are to be collaborative, interdisciplinary, and transparent. The idea is to maximize knowledge and minimize the kind of screwing around that continually threatens the efficacy of other wiki-based projects. Of course, the extent to which this is successful hinges on the quality, integrity, and transparency of the editors.

While … Read more

Google on Tuesday announced a new Maps feature to help make it easier to determine the availability of flu vaccine.

According to the company, users can now visit Google's new flu shot Google Maps page to find out if there is any vaccine available in their area. It partnered with "the U.S. Department for Health and Human Services, their Flu.gov collaborators, and the American Lung Association on the flu shot finder," the company wrote in a blog post.

On the flu shot page, users can input their Zip code or town and find all the … Read more

Aiming to reinforce its medical pedigree, Microsoft next week is launching a video show on developments in the health care technology arena.

The show's host, Bill Crounse, senior director of worldwide health at Microsoft, is a veteran of both broadcasting and medicine, having served as a broadcaster and practicing physician before joining Microsoft. In a chat on Friday, Crounse promised that the show itself won't be an ad for Microsoft's health care software, though the company is sponsoring the first few episodes with some short commercials.

"It's about demonstrating our investment and commitment to the … Read more

Dell announced on Tuesday that it has completed its $3.9 billion offer to buy Perot Systems. By accepting Perot's stock at $30 per share, Dell will own more than 90 percent of the company.

Dell's takeover of Perot has created a new business unit called Dell Services, which will provide IT services to customers. Dell's reach will now extend into technology hosting, consulting, and application outsourcing, among other segments.

Former Perot Chief Executive Officer Peter Altabef will become president of Dell Services, reporting directly to Dell Chairman and CEO Michael Dell. Altabef has steered Perot for … Read more