We store our email online. Documents. Photos. Financial information. Various companies offer these services, and one -- Google -- does them all, very well, for free. Why not add health information to the mix?

When I left Manhattan for the Society of Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM) annual meeting in Boston, I was ready for a change of scenery. We had gone live with a new information system in our emergency department just a month before. While the vendors thought it went smoothly enough, and the financial hit seemed (for the most part) mitigated, I was still fielding a lot of requests from my physician colleagues.

In this series, much space has been dedicated to explaining the changes coming to emergency medicine as hospitals try to qualify for federal stimulus dollars, by demonstrating meaningful use of electronic health records. But as these changes unfold, another tech revolution is taking place in health care – the way patients interact with each other, and with health organizations, using social media. 

EHR drug-drug interaction warnings may ultimately save lives, but does the collateral damage of “alert fatigue” negate the benefit?

EP-turned-CMIO Steven Davidson talks frankly about the challenges of qualifying for Meaningful Use.

You may not have realized it, but in recent months there has been a fundamental reordering of the way hospitals are regarding electronic health records (EHR), thanks to what some are calling the single most potent federal effort to change health care delivery in decades (Jha 2010). Part I in a new series edited by Nicholas Genes, MD, PhD

I am interested in keeping up on some academic topics I explored in residency, and furthering my various role(s) in my department. That means I’ve got to stay on top of an array of specialized news sources – from journals in several specialties, press releases, and web sites. A few years ago, this would’ve meant maintaining a hodgepodge of print and electronic resources, forcing me to thumb through a lot of journals’ tables of contents each month, or navigate dozens of bookmarks in my browser.

A few of you might be reading this on your new iPads. The rest of you are probably sick of the speculation and hype that Apple’s new tablet will transform the publishing world, just as the iPhone changed mobile phones and the iPod revolutionized the music industry. But a more relevant question for us is: “Can the iPad change the way we work in the emergency department?” I sure hope so.