By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor http://features.us.reuters.com WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Dr. Howard Stark’s office is quiet. Very quiet. No patients sit in his waiting room. No receptionist answers the telephone. Stark does not have a receptionist. Instead, he and his assistant Michele Norris-Bell check e-mail alerts on handheld devices and — between seeing patients […]

http://www.dcmedmalblog.com Hundreds of thousands of children in the U.S. face the prospect of a life-threatening asthma attack at a time when they have no health insurance, according to a new study recently published in the journal Ambulatory Pediatrics. Researchers utilized data collected in 2003 and 2004 at the National Center for Health Statistics and determined […]

By VANESSA FUHRMANS http://online.wsj.com Health plans are drawing scrutiny for offering financial incentives to entice doctors to prescribe cheaper generic medicines, including paying doctors $100 each time they switch a patient from a brand-name drug. Pharmaceutical companies have long gone to great lengths to try to get doctors to prescribe their brand-name pills. They spend […]

By Serena Gordon HealthDay Reporter http://www.washingtonpost.com A co-pay as small as $10 can stand in the way of a woman getting a potentially lifesaving mammography, new research suggests. When women in Medicare managed-care plans were asked to contribute a small co-pay, in some cases around $10 to $20, 8 percent of the women decided to […]

http://www.prnewswire.com/ Starting Feb. 1, 2008, MHA Insurance Company will grant a premium credit of up to 5 percent for qualifying policyholders who utilize an Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system. A qualifying policyholder would include independent solo physicians and group physician practices. Currently, MHA Insurance Company provides medical professional liability insurance to more than 3,000 independent […]

Health Plans Say New Rules Improve Safety and Cut Costs; Hospitals Can’t Dun Patients By VANESSA FUHRMANS http://online.wsj.com/ Health insurers are taking a new tack in a bid to improve patient safety and reduce health-care costs: refusing to pay — or let their patients be billed — for hospital errors. Aetna Inc., WellPoint Inc. and […]

http://blog.canadianemr.ca The Canadian 2007 National Physician Survey is now available. 26.1% of physicians use a combination of Electronic and Paper charts as their record keeping system. 9.8% of physicians use Electronic Charts instead of Paper Charts. This number indicates that we still have a long way to go in order to fully enable our physician […]

A Fort Washington firm offers health-care clients a chance to hear what they say to one another. By Linda Loyd Inquirer Staff Writer http://www.philly.com When Zaccary Newsham-Quinn, 4, visits his pediatrician in Levittown, the doctor, Nathan Zankman, asks if he would be willing to have their conversation recorded for use in medical research. Zaccary’s mother, […]

Patients Caught In Aetna-AMA Out-Of-Network Fight By DIANE LEVICK Courant Staff Writer Aetna and the American Medical Association are fighting about payments to doctors again, and patients across the nation are getting caught in between. The dispute centers on how much Aetna pays out-of-network doctors in some instances and the right of those doctors to […]