United States

Photo Credit: Marine Mammal Studies

by Deborah Dupre - examiner.com - February 11, 2012

A dolphin named "Chance," is the "first dolphin found alive in Alabama" since the April 20, 2010 Gulf of Mexico oilrig explosion.

"He's just like a black box. He's revealing some very important information as to what happened since the oil spill. A lot of information on disease, his health and other information on the environment."

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submitted by Janine Rees

by Andy Oram - radar.oreilly.com - February 6, 2012

I've come to look forward to the Massachusetts Heath Data Consortium's annual HIT conference because--although speakers tout the very real and impressive progress made by Massachusetts health providers--you can also hear acerbic and ruthlessly candid critiques of policy and the status quo. Two notable take-aways from last year's conference (which I wrote up at the time) were the equivalence of old "managed care" to new "accountable care organizations" and the complaint that electronic health records were "too expensive, too hard to use, and too disruptive to workflow." I'll return to these claims later.

The sticking point: health information exchange

This year, the spears were lobbed by Ashish Jha of Harvard Medical School, who laid out a broad overview of progress since the release of meaningful use criteria and then accused health care providers of undermining one of its main goals, the exchange of data between different providers who care for the same patient.