INFORMATION

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

Adobe's Portable Document Format helped transform the business world and bring it onto the Internet and into the paperless age. Today many people use PDF files for everything ranging from important personal papers to service manuals for lawn mowers. If you use PDFs a lot, you'll like PDF Summary Maker from Traction Software. It's a PDF file management tool that lets you change the summary information in one or many PDF files all at once. You can change the creator, creation date, producer, author, title, and keyword fields within your documents. It includes full database import and … Read more

PDF Info is a basic program that allows users to edit PDF header information. Although it is not a full-featured PDF editor, it works just fine for changing a PDF's title information.

The program's interface is sleek and simple, consisting of a single screen. The program's functions are represented by four large rounded buttons, with no menus. Users browse to the PDF they want to edit and open it, and the editable fields are displayed within the program. These include the file's name, author, title, keywords, and so on. Users simply make the desired changes and … Read more

Many dream of being their own boss, but those who start businesses quickly find that the work and responsibilities are more of a nightmare. A good accounting program can help take some of the weight off you and your employees by automating many tedious yet crucial tasks like bookkeeping, banking, sales, reporting, and inventory management. Business2Go Standard from Quest2Go Software is just such a program. It's a powerful, comprehensive multi-user suite of tools that will handle virtually all of your business accounting needs, from day-to-day record keeping and purchasing, to banking, customer issues, and analysis.

As is not unusual … Read more

A while back, a Personal Information Manager, or "PIM," was a handheld gadget that did what cell phones and BlackBerrys now do better. PIMs live on in the form of their software, which refined and combined the daily diary, planner, Rolodex, address book, and other wads of paper that once shackled busy people to cluttered desks, thus helping spark the transformation of the workplace. For busy people, they are essential, period. EfficientPIM is simply one of the best we've seen.

It's organized around a familiar and attention-getting subject: today. Tabs manage your calendar, contacts, events, tasks, … Read more

Are your calendars, to-do lists, and databases disorganized? Corral all of your schedules and lists with All-in-1 Personal Information Manager.

All-in-1 Personal Information Manager (A-PIM) is based around a calendar that shows the day and month and task lists for each day at a glance. A-PIM has other handy tools, such as a contact manager, and sections where you can create databases of your CD, DVD, and book collections. You can create sticky notes, agendas, and journal entries, and you can manage your expenses with A-PIM's Money section. A-PIM will even keep a list of your favorite URLs in … Read more

The government's $19 billion incentive package to compel doctors and hospitals to digitize their inefficient paper record systems is nice and shiny. But until a platform exists to support the easy yet secure flow of highly sensitive personal information, that promise could also be empty.

Seeing a business opportunity, General Electric unveiled on Thursday its new unit, eHealth, a suite of solutions that aims to provide the necessary infrastructure. (GE reports that it is investing $90 million to launch eHealth.) It is a daunting task, but if it works, a digital record system that streamlines connectivity between clinicians and … Read more

H1N1 influenza, better known as the swine flu, is guaranteed to make an impact across the U.S. and the rest of the world in the coming months. But knowing what to expect, and how to determine if H1N1 is impacting where you live, should be the first step in your evaluation of the swine flu.

And that's where this roundup comes in. Listed below, you will find several resources that will help you not only track the swine flu, but probably help you learn a little something about it as well.

Centers for Disease Control -- The Centers for Disease Control has some of the best information on the swine flu of any site in this roundup. Everything from its causes to its symptoms are available.

Information on the swine flu from the CDC is the best I've seen on the Web. The site offers basic information for those who want an overview. It quickly digs deep into treating family members afflicted with swine flu, why a vaccination might be useful, who the flu is most likely to affect, and more. It also produces videos and podcasts. Overall, I liked the CDC's presentation on the swine flu. It's extremely informative.

FluTracker -- Rhiza Lab's FluTracker app is one of the best ways to track the swine flu on the Web.

When you get to the site, you'll see several colored circles around a map of the world. The color of each circle denotes the severity of the outbreak in a given location. Inside those circles are numbers, giving you a tally of confirmed outbreaks in a particular country. Perhaps most importantly, the site allows you to zoom in to see how many outbreaks have affected your area. You can even see how many deaths have occurred. If you're looking for in-depth but easily understandable tracking of the swine flu, FluTracker is your best bet.… Read more

Small Library Organizer Pro is a database program for keeping track of the contents of libraries. Although the program works fine, there are likely more sophisticated options available to accomplish this task.

The program's interface looks very dated: it's reminiscent of Windows 95. Not surprisingly, it's not particularly intuitive, and in general its layout feels somewhat cluttered and clunky. To its credit, the program does open with a brief explanation of its features, allowing users to get started without too much trouble. The program offers five different database templates to choose from; Borrowers, Library, Loans, and Fines. … Read more