What’s standing in the way of the wider spread of health IT?

Plenty of things, according to a new report from the Bipartisan Policy Center. The report says boosting use of electronic medical records and other health IT “enjoys bipartisan support.” It’s also being pushed by billions of dollars in government incentives.

On January 16, 2012, a comScore Data Gem blog post announced that the number of people using their mobile phones to access health-related information has grown by 125 percent in 2011.

Email has been so commonplace for so long that some people consider it nearly obsolete. But in the health-care profession, its use for communications between doctors and their patients is still controversial.
Yes: It builds trust, says Joseph C. Kvedar.
No: You miss too much, says Sam Bierstock.

Big Data—the ability to collect, process and interpret massive amounts of information—is one of today's most important technological drivers. While companies see it as a way of detecting weak market signals, one of the biggest potential areas of application for society is health care.

A year ago today, India saw its last recorded case of polio in an 18-month-old girl in West Bengal named Rukhsar Khatoon. She recovered without lasting paralysis.

One year without another case is an impressive milestone in the decades-long effort to wipe the poliovirus from the face of the planet. Only a few years ago, India reported more polio cases than anywhere else — as many as 100,000 cases a year.