May 2008

The advent of managed care in the late 1960s was probably the last major "innovation" in healthcare delivery.

Concerns about online PHRs are overblown given that Americans have become avid users of Internet-based financial services.

All physicians understand that learning is a lifelong activity. Whether we are interested in fulfilling our professional CME requirements, or learning about new things that simply enrich our lives, opportunities to become more educated and knowledgeable have never been easier to find and access. This broad availability of educational resources is, in large part, due to widespread access to personal computers and the Internet.

Andre Elisseef of IBM's Zurich Research Lab explains how IBM's Anatomic and Symbolic Mapper Engine (ASME) enables physicians to visualize patient records using three-dimensional representations of the human body.

The best programs also come equipped with medical dictionaries with thousands of words commonly used in daily practice by physicians and specialists, eliminating the need to build the program's vocabulary from scratch.

What is most remarkable about online CME is the fact that, when it comes to the actual nature of the educational materials on offer, nothing has really changed.

Anirban Bandyopadhyay, PhD, artifi cial intelligence and molecular electronics scientist, National Institute for Materials Science at Tsukuba, Japan, talks about the "Nano-brain," a brain neuron-inspired, microscopic computer made up of 17 duroquinone molecules sitting in a ring pattern on a gold surface. The assembly has the potential to perform more than 4.3 billion commands at once, and could have far-reaching implications for medicine.

Doug Farrago, MD, is a full-time practicing physician in Auburn, ME, and the founder of the Placebo Journal (www.placebojournal.com), which is meant to "empower physicians with a skill that is sorely lacking â€" humor."

The maverick doctor opens up about why his original practice wasn't sustainable, the inadequacy of physician quality ratings, and why his new corporate venture isn't so out of character.