Top Story

• WHIT 3.0 conference gets under way
  During day one of the WHIT 3.0 conference, Wired Magazine's Kevin Kelly reviewed the first 5,000 days of the Internet and former National Coordinator for Health Information Technology David Brailer took an audience poll to find people were evenly divided on where their health data would reside in the future -- health plans, providers, IT companies or government -- which is a challenge to working through the issue. World Health Care Blog (12/9)

• Editor's Choice Awards announced: Winners of the newly created Editor's Choice Awards, co-sponsored by WHIT 3.0 and Health Data Management, were named in the categories of large hospitals, medium and small hospitals, group practices and payers. Health Data Management (12/10)

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Hospitals

• Intel's portable bedside C5 tablet being tested
  Intel Corp. has created the C5 portable hospital computer, a tablet with a wireless Internet connection that connects to patient-monitoring equipment and centrally stored medical records to help nurses and doctors save time. About 1,500 hospitals around the world are buying or testing the product, the company said. Bloomberg (12/10)

• Hospital buys automated medication cabinets
  Desert Regional Medical Center has bought Cerner Corp.'s automated medication-dispensing cabinets, which integrate with the group's EHR and pharmacy-information systems. Health Data Management (12/7)

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Providers

• Editorial: Single source for doctor ratings needed
  New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's work to make health insurance ratings more informative and user-friendly for patients may result in only modest gains for consumers, a New York Times editorial says. Instead, insurance companies should submit their data to an independent organization to provide all cost and quality information on a single Web site, the editorial says. NYTimes.com (12/8)

Technology Trends

• SureScripts aims high as lawmakers tout e-prescribing
  Virginia-based SureScripts is hoping to become a leader in the electronic-prescribing industry as lawmakers work with the HHS to transition pharmacies into going electronic. A Senate bill would impose a penalty on doctors who don't use e-prescribing by 2011. SureScripts expects to handle 35 million prescriptions this year and 100 million in 2008. The Washington Post (12/10)

• More patients keep at-home health records
  Companies like Aetna and Kaiser Permanente are giving members more access to online records, helping patients compile personal files to share with their doctors. The records can help patients manage their health, avoid unnecessary tests and identify false information. Los Angeles Times (12/10)

• Abaxis secures FDA OK for 12-minute blood-test device
  Abaxis has received an FDA waiver for its Piccolo xpress, a compact blood-screening device that tests renal, liver, cholesterol, lipid, glucose and other blood levels within about 12 minutes. A company executive expects physicians' offices to be major buyers of the device, which will allow them to run tests while patients wait. American City Business Journals/San Jose (12/7)

Hot Topics

Top five news stories selected by eHealth SmartBrief readers in the past week.

• ONCHIT names groups to define common health IT terms (Health Data Management)

• Bush administration seeks health IT mandate for Medicare bill (The Hill)

• Leavitt urges health IT adoption (The Wall Street Journal (free content))

• Hospitals try to make IT useful for nurses (Healthcare IT News)

• Health IT groups unveil regulatory timeline (Health Data Management)

• Results based on number of times each story was clicked by readers.

Regulatory/Legislative

• More states reporting patient-safety data, but methods vary widely
  More than half of the 50 states have implemented patient-safety reporting systems that make adverse event data from health care facilities more readily available, which some experts believe is the first step toward a standardized, nationwide reporting system. However, the processes and methods by which states get information to patients vary significantly, and better agreement on how the data are used needs to be reached, others say. Modern Healthcare (free registration) (12/10)

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SmartQuote

Compassion is the basis of all morality." --Arnold Schopenhauer, German philosopher