Using individual healthcare Web sites that allow patients to share the progress of serious injury or illness, people confronted with health emergencies can keep friends and family updated instantly on how they are doing. Between CaringBridge and CarePages, two of the industry's large patient Web services, nearly 200,000 sites have been created in the past decade. Hundreds more have gone up on private systems sponsored by hospitals.
Motivated by mounting medical costs, lawmakers and executives are urging doctors to prescribe medications online. But older physicians have been reluctant to go paperless, arguing that the upfront costs of going digital fall on their shoulders, while the immediate savings go to pharmacy benefits managers.
AT&T Inc. is partnering with Tennessee to provide a statewide system to electronically exchange patient medical information. The system is designed to securely transmit detailed patient information between medical professionals, and will allow doctors to access medical histories, prescribe medicines over the Internet and transfer images.
Google Inc. will begin storing the medical records of a few thousand people as it tests a long-awaited health service. The pilot project will involve 1,500 to 10,000 patients at the Cleveland Clinic who volunteered to an electronic transfer of their personal health records so they can be retrieved through Google's new service. Each health profile will be protected by a password that's also required to use other Google services such as e-mail and personalized search tools.
Entrepreneur buys up sites for individual cities, creating YourCity.MD, a network of about 300 city-specific healthcare Web sites. The creator is willing to wager that consumers looking for a new doctor, a flu shot or a referral for shoulder surgery will flock to the sites, and anticipates that 200,000 doctors who will be using the site by the end of the year.
The Supreme Court made it harder for consumers to sue manufacturers of federally approved medical devices. In an 8-1 decision, the court ruled against the estate of a patient who suffered serious injuries when a catheter burst during a medical procedure. The case has significant implications for the $75 billion-a-year healthcare technology industry, whose products range from heart valves to toothbrushes. In a recent three-month span, federal regulators responded to over 100 safety problems regarding medical devices.