healthcare

Microsoft to buy Sentillion for health care software

Microsoft is adding another player to its portfolio of health care offerings.

The software powerhouse said Thursday that it plans to buy Sentillion, a privately held company that supplies software to health care professionals. Microsoft hopes to combine Sentillion's technologies with its own Amalga Unified Intelligence System (UIS). The goal is to offer integrated technology that can help health care providers more easily access patient data from across multiple sources.

As doctors and hospitals ramp up to make better use of e-health technology, they face a confusing array of tools and systems that could make their jobs more difficult. … Read more

The psychology of healthcare reform

The House has passed the first comprehensive reform package of the health insurance industry in decades, which is now up for debate in the Senate. This is a highly complex issue, but there are some quite basic reasons why it's so difficult to accomplish significant reform, and in part these have to do with psychological responses to change and uncertainty. 

A few years ago I was fortunate to work with a couple of organizational consultants, and they introduced me to the concept of NICs and PUFs. These funny sounding acronyms give insight into why health care reform is … Read more

Quicken service targets medical bills

Making sense of medical bills can be a challenge for both the patient and doctor. A new service from Intuit is trying to ease that pain.

Quicken Health Bill Pay, a free online service from Intuit, is meant to help consumers better understand and pay their medical bills online. The service presents the bills in an easy-to-read language, said Intuit, so patients can view the services they received and see the exact balance due after insurance. From there, they can pay the bill directly online.

The service debuts as tech companies are increasingly directing their attention to the field of … Read more

The great healthcare word-of-mouth debate

While the rest of the developed world looks at the controversy over healthcare reform in the US with a mix of embarrassment and disbelief, Americans have experienced a raging debate this summer that was to a large part driven by word-of-mouth online.

MotiveQuest, a research firm, has evaluated the healthcare chatter bouncing around the Internet. It pulled data from more than 100 health and political forums and blogs, representing more than 2,000,000 posts and 110,000 people in the average month. Categorizing the debate’s language into thematic groups (treatments, payment methods, doctors/patients, and the uninsured), it … Read more

The 404 416: Where our stocks are on fire and Jill hoses us down

Jill Schlesinger of CBS' MoneyWatch joins the show to talk about the economy. So it turns out that things aren't going to collapse, and we're not going to have to sell our bodies in a barter system. That doesn't mean, however, that we're out of the woods, and Jill is here to show us the way out. Throw in a little bit of health care, a little bit of Social Security, and a garlic smell? Only on The 404!

For the last couple of months, stocks have been soaring more than 50 percent since their March low. Jill says all that means is that the market doesn't think we're headed for Great Depression 2.0, but that doesn't mean we're out of trouble. In the dark, we imagine what V-, U-, and W- recoveries would look like. Strange... Justin, is that your hand on my leg?

Further down the line, we jump into the health care debate. Jill tells us her generation is screwing our generation and not in a good way. Essentially, they took all the good health care, and we (the 20-somethings) will just not be able to afford the premium "best health care" in the world, when we really need it. And somehow, Wilson reveals some of his Republican leanings? Say what?

Finally, we get into personal savings for the future, and we pick up the ashes of our 401(k)s. So while your parents may have lost a bundle on their retirement funds, we 20-somethings still have another 40 years before we really have to worry about our returns. Meanwhile, Social Security is a toss-up. Jill wants to advise President "Barry" Obama that the easy solution to fixing the "Third Rail" of American politics is just tying benefits to an age index. People are just living too long...death panels, any one?

Wow! So we hope you finally learned something on The 404. We sure did! Send in your feedback to the usual at the404 [at] cnet [dot] com. Follow Jill on Twitter. Or leave us a voice mail at 1-866-404-CNET, and you can debate us on the finer points of the liquidity of the money supply and U6 unemployment figures.

Episode 416 Subscribe in iTunes audio | Subscribe to iTunes (video) | Subscribe in RSS Audio | Subscribe in RSS Video… Read more

Open source, not $19 billion, may be best health care stimulus

The federal economic stimulus package provides $19 billion to upgrade the U.S. health care system to digital records. It's a nice gesture, but the U.S. federal government has already developed a robust medical ERP system that could significantly improve U.S. health care. It's called VistA. It's open source.

It's already paid for.

VistA was developed by the U.S. Veterans Administration and the medical professionals involved in its extensive hospital network. Read: doctors developing software for other doctors.

This bottom-up development effort appears to be working: the VA hospital system consistently delivers superior … Read more

Former Red Hat execs aim to open-source health care

It was bound to happen. With the U.S. government promising truckloads of cash to overhaul the U.S. health care system, while simultaneously making positive noises around open source, it was just a matter of time before someone connected the dots.

That someone appears to be Joanne Rohde, former executive vice president of worldwide operations at Red Hat, who has launched the Axial Project, a stealth-mode start-up that aims to "combin[e] the principles of Open Standards and Open Source...to connect all the parties in the Health ecosystem safely and securely."

It's a big task, … Read more

Students predict the future of health records

It's hard to predict just how the effort to move medical records from paper to digital will shape up.

That said, a collection of business students recently gave it their best shot. As part of an annual "war game" exercise, students from such schools as Penn's Wharton School of Business took on the roles of key industry players in an effort to imagine how the battle to digitize America's health records will play out.

Among their predictions: entrenched interests will slow change, industry players will have to consolidate, and the financial pressure will need to … Read more

Open source becomes a force in health care IT

Open source is picking up steam in enterprise computing, even as the economy peters out. If West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller has his way, open source will soon make its mark on medicine, too, with the lower cost of open source a key impetus behind the move.

Rockefeller last week introduced Senate Bill 90, the "Health Information Technology Public Utility Act of 2009," which "would create a Public Utility Board under (National Coordinator for Health Information Technology) David Blumenthal to push a model of open-source health software, offer grants to hospitals which adopt the model, ensure interoperability … Read more