national health

Microsoft CEO Bill Gates told the National Conference of State Legislatures that one of the keys to keeping expanding healthcare costs is investing in technology. In a keynote speech to state lawmakers, Gates said advances in biotechnology and health information technology are likely to revolutionize healthcare. Gates said state investment will help that transformation, making a national health infrastructure financially attainable. As it stands, Gates said, "the overhead of this …

Modern Healthcare has released its annual survey of healthcare consultants ranked by their healthcare practice revenue for 2004. Coming in at No. 1 is Deloitte with $830 million in revenue. Following close behind are Accenture ($800 million) and CapGemini ($750 million). Not surprisingly, many analysts see the most significant deal of the year in the consulting space is Accenture's purchase of CapGemini, which created a consulting titan with $1.5 billion in combined revenues. The recent …

National Health IT coordinator Dr. David Brailer told an audience of about 200 physicians, software engineers and executives from Kaiser Permanente at a health IT conference that the company's new electronic health records system should "serve as a national model." Kaiser's HealthConnect initiative will see the company spend $3.3 billion on modernization technology throughout its health care network over the course of the next decade. "The way Kaiser has gone about doing this is a great …

ZDNet has a long article on the push for a national electronic records system. Yesterday, the Health subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee heard testimony on the issue. Lawmakers noted that progress has been "painfully slow" and that a system has the "potential to dramatically improve the safety and quality of health care for Americans," in the words of committee chair Rep. Nancy Johnson (R-CT).

National Health IT coordinator David Brailer said that government …

The Kaiser Family Foundation will webcast an "ask the experts panel" on the future of Health IT on Thursday, June 30, featuring National Health IT coordinator David Brailer, National Medical Association President William Price, MD, and Dean Rosen, Director of Health Policy Office of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. E-mail questions to ask@kaisernetwork.org. Website

The news this week that IDX has lost one of its two contracts for the UK's national health infrastructure upgrade may be bad news for them and good news for Cerner. But it's also a reminder that IT projects of any scale are big and complex, and also that healthcare IT is sufficiently complex that only specialty companies are in the market. Apart from Siemens, whose acquisition of SMS …