A study appearing in February’s edition of the journal Pediatrics, indicates that a diagnosis of cancer doesn’t doom youngsters to a miserable childhood. According to this research, after treatment many kids are just as happy and well-adjusted as those who never had the illness, and sometimes even more so.

The findings are based on interviews with 8- to 12-year-olds and show how resilient youngsters can be even when facing something as scary as cancer. The results also indicate that children’s perceptions very often differ from those of their parents, whose own negative feelings about the experience may influence how they feel their children are coping.

Quoted in an AP article on the study, Dr. Smita Bhatia, lead author and a pediatric cancer specialist at City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, California said, “What we are finding is very reassuring. Parents should be encouraged to know that young survivors “can indeed put their cancer behind them.”

The full text study is available here. 

Research by the non-profit Center for Information Technology Leadership indicates that the standardization of the exchange of healthcare information could save the industry about $86 billion. The CTIL data was presented at the HIMSS conference being held this week in Orlando, Florida.

From American Medical News: Like others in the nonprofit world, hospitals are cashing in on a relatively new way to raise charitable donations by using online auctions as fund-raising events.

Though items have been auctioned over the Internet for years, experts say a surge in the popularity of online auction houses, such as eBay, and growing computer savvy among the general public has helped fuel hospitals’ increased use of the technology. Observers say hospitals also are being forced to be more creative in finding new sources of donations.

From the Boston Globe: Children’s Hospital in Boston said it signed a $35 million, three-year contract with Cerner Corporation to provide a computer system that promises to make patient care more efficient and reduce the chance of medical errors. The contract, for an integrated clinical information technology system, will help doctors and nurses calculate the right medication doses for children, based on weight, and make sure the dose is given to the right patient at the right time. The system will also provide caregivers with up-to-date information about pediatric research.

From the Boston Globe: Dr. Mark Horton has piloted a propeller plane miles into the Arizona desert and thousands of feet to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. It’s the only way the ophthalmologist gets to see some of his patients.

So when Horton’s employer, the Indian Health Service, partnered with the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston to roll out a telemedicine program to detect diabetic eye disease, he quickly recognized the scale of the opportunity. The Joslin camera snaps digital photographs of a patient’s retina — without needing to dilate their pupils — and the images are transmitted electronically to a trained reader in a central location.

“Theoretically,” Horton said, “you can [read the images] from home in your underwear.”

From the London Times: England’s National Health Service announced that it has awarded three contracts for computerizing its health records, including two contracts worth $2.8 billion to BT and one to Accenture worth $1.9 billion. It is expected that three further contracts will be announced by the end of the year.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last week adopted new rules to improve the universal service program for rural health care providers. The program helps rural health care providers obtain access to modern telecommunications and information services for medical and health maintenance purposes. The six-year-old program provides discounted telecommunications services to rural health care providers at rates equal to the rates charged for similar services in urban areas.

From Government Computer News: The Food and Drug Administration and the National Cancer Institute are teaming to up to build a grid-computing system that will let drug researchers share developmental data about cancer drugs.

The initiative will let researchers electronically submit applications to investigate new drugs. It also will give cancer researchers online access to FDA’s drug review databases, letting them access and evaluate clinical trial data.

The data-sharing program is part of NCI’s broader Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid Project, caBIG.

From Federal Computer Week: Veterans have a new resource for up-to-date information about medications and health news with the Department of Veterans Affairs’ launch of the My HealtheVet portal.

The site is designed to be a one-stop service for VA benefits, special programs and health information. It also offers a health education library and tools for measuring health status.

TheraDoc, Inc. announced contracts with two of the premier medical centers in the country, Chicago’s Northwestern Memorial Hospital (Northwestern) and The John Hopkins Hospital and Health System (Hopkins) in Baltimore.

A medical informatics company specializing in therapeutic decision-support, TheraDoc will implement its Infection Control Assistant, Antibiotic Assistant and Public Health Surveillance at both health care providers. TheraDoc’s knowledge-based solutions will provide clinicians at each institution with enhanced infection control capabilities and the critical, real-time information necessary to reduce errors and improve the quality and timeliness of patient care

This week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) awarded a four-year grant for nearly $500,000 to Cybernet Medical, a provider of biometric monitoring technology and medical devices for outpatient care.

The grant will be used to continue a rural telemedicine project between Cybernet and Integris Health’s rural telemedicine project for chronic disease patients in rural Oklahoma. The project’s pilot program began in October 2002 for 11 patients. Beginning in December, the grant will assist 200 patients in six Integris hospitals suffering from heart failure, diabetes, stroke, and congestive obstructive pulmonary diseases.

From the San Francisco Chronicle: Breaking her silence for the first time, the Pakistani woman who threatened to release UCSF patient files on the Internet says she had “no choice” but to breach the hospital’s security after being cut off by the Texas man who’d made her the final link in a long chain of clerical subcontractors.

Lubna Baloch said by e-mail from Karachi that she is “not an opportunistic person who willfully did that to gain some attention.”

She said she is instead the “worst sufferer of this situation” because she was only trying to secure UCSF Medical Center’s help last month in obtaining money that she was owed.

From the Business Journal of Kansas City: In a bold move to assert the power of the physician, 900 Kansas City area doctors have banded together to form a PPO and market themselves directly to big employers and the federal government.

Their pitch: Because of technology, they will be able to prove that they provide better health care services than their competitors.

From the Telemedicine Information Exchange [TIE]: The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) has recently revised its hospital standards for credentialing telemedicine providers. The revised standard, MS.4.120, effective January 1, 2004, should reduce the credentialing and privileging burden on originating sites where the patient is located. This standard is applicable only to licensed independent practitioners (LIPs) at distant sites where the practitioner provides professional services, who have total or shared responsibility for the patient’s care, treatment, and services via a telemedicine link.

From the Business Journal of Portland: In a society where business is increasingly conducted by electronic communication, few physicians are reimbursed for the time they spend with patients on e-mail.

Should that practice be altered? Speakers at The Business Journal’s health care round table offered a variety of views on the topic.

Both Kaiser Permanente Northwest and The Regence Group are studying whether such a model would save money and time for physicians. Pilot programs run by both groups showed that a small number of patients—perhaps three in 10—opt to communicate with physicians via e-mail when given the chance.