New Ways to Use Social Networking Sites

Government and the health care industry don’t appear to be positioned for a meeting of minds early in 2010. President Obama is expected to back off of reform, and last year’s HITECH Act appears to be already giving additional bite to HIPAA as Connecticutt’s AG delivers a lawsuit on the doorstep of Health Net for security breach of private health records. Popcorn, anyone?

On a lighter note, USA Today has published an interesting opinion piece by Kevin Pho, MD, encouraging physicians to embrace social networking tools as a way to interact with patients. For me, the comments on the article were as interesting as the article itself. The WWW information highway today is, for practical purposes, an electronic “Wild West,” and it is easy to see how widely adopted tools such as Facebook and Twitter can serve to build a railway through it. I know 75-year old grandparents who wouldn’t dream of using e-mail or regularly visiting blogs, but log on to Facebook on a daily basis.

Takeda has sent out a letter informing physicians that the initial dose of VELCADE should be reduced to 0.7 mg/m2 in the first treatment cycle for patients with moderate to severe hepatic impairment. If you have patients under the care of a specialist for multiple myeloma or mantle cell lymphoma, you can read details of the revised dosing instructions on the FDA website. The Class 1 recall of Huber needles manufactured by Japan’s Nipro Medical Corporation has been all over the news, but you can also go to the FDA website for more specifics.