Integration as Cure: the future of Medical Records

Electronic Medical Records or EMRs faces its fair share of challenges, but the demand for them is growing. Electronic health records could improve care, reduce errors and eventually lower healthcare costs, but obstacles abound.

One of the biggest? Most hospitals and doctor's offices use noninteroperable software and databases. And, there are some other obstacles such as privacy and cost.

Here are some ideas on ways around these»

Dear Marcy, Why would anyone want to copy and paste Excel data?

Dear Marcy,
I get weekly sales data sent to me via csv files, and then I use pivot tables in Excel to analyze the information and create reports based on that information, and e-mail it to my colleagues. That way I don’t have to get IT involved, and they don’t have me messing around on the database.

I saw last week that Joe was talking about Excel spreadsheets on his blog, and how end-users could copy and paste data from Excel into m-Power, but I went through the presentation, and I don’t really understand why a company would want to do this?

Here's what Marcy had to say»

IT Productivity: Measuring the Immeasurable

Raw productivity gains, according to this article, aren't sufficient to compete successfully in the 21st century. "What you want is agile productivity," he maintains. "You want to be able to repurpose the assets of your business as efficiently as possible to stay current with the market."

Agility, of course, is but another way to describe a kind of perpetual state of innovation, of moving fast enough—through product and process development, and into and out of markets as opportunity dictates—to compete.

Poolside business apps and other (better) ways to do business.

When Emhart Glass's Application Development Manager, Alan Batchelor, had to interrupt his vacation and go into the office because one of his servers was not started, he was pretty annoyed. And rightly so.

Necessity is the mother of invention, though.

Alan solved the problem, quite ingeniously, by creating a wireless application with m-Power that allows him to send commands from his cell phone even when he's poolside. And that was just he beginning. Learn what else he built»

New Coalition Giving U.S. Doctors Free E-Prescribing Software Services

It's estimated that 3.2 billion prescriptions are written each year by U.S. doctors, and currently less than 20% of American doctors use e-prescribing, says Dr. Nancy Dickey, currently president of the Health Science Center and vice chancellor for Health Affairs at the Texas A&M University System and formerly president of the American Medical Association.

It's also estimated that between 7,000-9,000 American patients die -- and 1.5 million are injured -- each year by preventable medication errors, according to a July 2006 report by the Institute of Medicine.

Read all about it»

Study: Leading retail sites slow to adopt AJAX

According to a recent survey less than 20 percent of retail shopping sites are using AJAX to build out their sites, and only 6 percent are using advanced AJAX techniques.

"AJAX is arguably the best rich Internet application available to developers right now, but its complexity and the disruption to traditional development processes (seem) to be hindering the widespread adoption predicted by many experts," says one of the study administrators.

Particularly in companies where product information can be called up (like retail) or manufacturing, distribution, so users can immediately get all of the information they need instantly. Of course, this isn't as big of an issue when AJAX is built right in.

Cool new technology: Think cows with tattoos

Just when you thought you've heard of everything...picture cows with tattoos. A new technology has been developed: a safe, invisible, RFID ink that can be detected up to four feet away.

While the jury is still out on the big brother implications of this breakthrough, the possible uses of this ink seem boundless. The FDA and CDC will be able to track food from beginning to end to quickly track down such problems as e.coli outbreaks and animal diseases.

Stolen goods can be quickly ID'd and returned. And in the supply chain community, this may mean an even more seamless method of tracking goods and packages from creation to sale, and everything in between. Learn more here»

Trend to watch: How IT Is Revitalizing Staff Skills

This ComputerWorld article offers insight as to where IT is leading, and keeping staffers focused on the best ways of applying technology to business, rather than focusing on technology skills in and of themselves.

“You can go on the street and find a good Java programmer or those types of skills,” says William Ulrich, president of Tactical Strategy Group Inc. in Soquel, Calif. “It is much more difficult to go outside the company and find someone who understands the in-depth nature of your business.”

Here's what skills are being valued»