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THE BRIEFING ROOM • THE BLOG THE BLOG TUESDAY, AUGUST 4TH, 2009 AT 6:55 AM Facts Are Stubborn Things Posted by Macon Phillips Opponents of health insurance reform may find the truth a little inconvenient, but as our second president famously said, "facts are stubborn things." Scary chain emails and videos are starting to percolate on the internet, breathlessly claiming, for example, to "uncover" the truth about the President’s health insurance reform positions. In this video, Linda Douglass, the communications director for the White House’s Health Reform Office, addresses one example that makes it look like the President intends to...

Federal authorities have opened a criminal investigation of whether Internal Revenue Service employees broke the law when they targeted conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status — the latest setback for an agency that is the subject of withering bipartisan criticism and multiple congressional inquiries. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said Tuesday that the Justice Department and the FBI began the probe after the IRS acknowledged that it selected conservative groups with the words “tea party” and “patriot” in their names for special reviews. “We are examining the facts to see if there were criminal violations,” Holder said at a news...

SNIPPET: "(CNSNews.com) – The Senate Committee on Aging last week offered a preview of the government’s future role in health care, showing how Americans will interact with doctors and other health care providers. The demonstration offers a glimpse at an overlooked effect of health care reform. The effort, loosely called e-Health or e-Care..." SNIPPET: "Kaushal, testifying before the committee via video conference due travel disruptions caused by the Icelandic volcano, said that Medicare needs to begin reimbursing for e-Care technologies so that doctors will have an incentive to purchase and install them." SNIPPET: "Despite the high praise and high hopes...

DR. WAX is a family physician based in Mullica Hill, N.J. He reports having no conflicts of interest related to this editorial.I consider myself a computer literate physician. In high school, I taught myself to program in BASIC on my Atari 800, which had a whopping 48K RAM. In college, I transitioned to the Apple Macintosh. At medicine morning rounds, I saw the Palm Pilot Pro and had to have one. I've been desktop and mobile computing ever since. I had spent the past 6 years investigating electronic health record (EHR) systems when, finally, on Black Friday 2009, I took...

By next June, electronic health record systems will be available that are certified as capable of exchanging data with other providers when standards are decided. They will also meet criteria for basic clinical doctors’ offices functions, said Mark Leavitt, director of the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology of Chicago, the nonprofit organization in charge of establishing the certification process. The initial cases for health IT applications are for chronic care management, disease or bioterror surveillance and a personal health record, said John Halamka, chairman of the Health IT Standards Panel and Harvard Medical School CIO. His panel also will...