The Consumer: Support for Patients, Just a Mouse Click Away
521507
Several companies have sprung up in recent years to help people with serious illnesses and their families stay easily connected.
658767
BBC Click investigates how technology is enabling adverts to be tailored to individuals consumers.
17568
Many NHS patients could soon be able to make an appointment to see their GP over the internet.
665989
I overheard a long-time hospital client talking to another support vendor today. The hospitalâs patient accounting department was attempting to send patient financial and billing data to a third-party biller. The vendorâs normal Web site was down, and they were trying to come up with an emergency fix.
221587
The ever-increasing number of medicines available without a prescription has been a godsend for many Americans. Consumers can now gain access to treatments for ills ranging from
525930
Device is designed for home users, but its price tag is steep.
91675
Â· One patient a day dies waiting for a transplant Â· BMA backs idea, but other groups voice concerns
434978
WASHINGTON - Privacy advocates are concerned that an implantable microchip designed to help doctors tap into a patient's medical records could undermine confidentiality or could even be used to track the patient's movements.   "If privacy protections aren't built in at the outset, there could be harmful consequences for patients," said Emily Stewart, a policy analyst at the Health Privacy Project...
571953
Patients currently don't have any way to keep their personal information from being shared with third parties.
480305
(InfoWorld) - Computerization of health care record keeping remains both a need and a challenge, said IT and health care dignitaries at an IBM-sponsored conference in San Jose, Calif. on Monday. IBM's New Paradigms for Using Computers 2007 workshop focused on health care interfaces. Previous years' workshops have covered such topics as Web 2.0 and mobile computing. "Health care is moving in the direction of computerization, but there's so many difficult issues in the user interface in particular that have not been addressed," said John Barton, manager of Interaction Science at IBM. Right now, health care is plagued by bad interfaces, said Paul Tang, vice president and chief medical officer at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation in Palo Alto, Calif. "It's really driving under the influence of terrible interfaces," he said. Tang cited studies that estimated 44,000 to 98,000 deaths per year in the United States resulting from medical mismanagement in hospitals. Patient safety would be enhanced by having better information available, he stressed. Information is fragmented. "There's almost no way a single individual could put this stuff together," but health depends on it, he said. Rather than just throwing computers at what are now paper processes, ethnography would help in figuring out what information is needed, said Tang.Â  At Palo Alto Medical Foundation, a Web site, PAMFOnline, provides patients and health care persons access to the same records. Patients can enter information and access data like test results. But patients can only add to personal, not official, health records, Tang said. About 45 percent of the foundation's patients are signed up. Should they choose, patients can pay $60 year to send messages to their doctors via the site, said Tang. He said he did not expect to ever see a centralized national health record database because of public concerns over privacy and security. "To put all information into one database just puts too much at risk," Tang said when interviewed after his presentation. Introduction of electronic health records is a nice way to make doctors and nurses more efficient, but it takes more time to use a computer than paper, said speaker Jakob Bardram, a professor at the IT University of Copenhagen who has been involved in health care. Paper records will not go away, he said. It is easier, however, to retrieve information on computers than on paper, Bardram said. Hospital persons need to be able to move about the building and enter information on different systems rather than being consigned to a single terminal for data entry, he said. PDAs, for their part, are not much of a solution because they do not have batteries that will have last a full seven-hour shift, said Bardram. "I think [PDAs] have a hard time in hospitals," Bardram said. But PDAs are being used in hospitals, he said. He urged development of middleware or operating systems that support mobility in hospitals and extend to health care workers' homes. Through a concept dubbed "Activity Roaming," health care workers could move between different computers and systems. A middleware platform has been developed for this, but it has not been deployed yet, said Bardram. IBM efforts in health care have included work on standards such as HL7 (Health Level 7) as well as participation in the Nationwide Health Information Network. The company is seeking to connect islands of information, such as patients, clinics, and hospitals. Also the event, Barbara Bennett, a health care business and transactional lawyer, said the IT industry has no clue what it means to delve into health care because health care is heavily regulated and IT has had little of this "It's overwhelming" to people used to a business has been essentially unregulated, Bennett said. She listed key legal risks to watch for in developing products for health care: * Privacy and security, including overlapping federal and state laws. * FDA regulations that govern how medical devices, including software, can packaged, labeled, marketed, and sold. * Medicare reimbursement, in which products must be reimbursable if they are to be sold. * Fraud and abuse, in which influencing patient or physician choices can be seen as an attempt to steer health care product referrals. This factor can affect a product design and sales strategy. * Malpractice. Technology can be seen by users as potentially causing mistakes rather than preventing them.
708458
With technology booming, consumers are starting to stray away  from traditional movie and TV watching. Their personal viewing  experience now includes their computer, portable video devices,  and even cell phones.
601984
Vulnerabilities in healthcare software often go unreported.
372470
Digital technology changes from workhorse to entertainer.
90484
In the Internet age, making telephone contact with a human for customer service is a daunting task. Some companies no longer disclose phone numbers. But some consumers have found ways around the blockade.
593455
The Food and Drug Administration approved an implantable computer chip that can pass a patient's medical details to doctors.
365953
Life & style: Many pamphlets for patients at GP surgeries have no NHS authorisation. Rather, they are put out by companies promoting products
671352
Focus on the consumer's everyday needs.