UK doctors question e-record roll-out

The British Medical Association (BMA) is calling on the Department of Health to suspend the roll-out of summary care records, states The Register.

The BMA says the project was being accelerated and it has serious concerns that patients are not getting the information they need to decide whether or not they want their medical records put onto a centralised system. The doctors group wants opt-out forms to be included in the information packs which are currently being sent out to patients.

The group is writing to health minister Mike O'Brien to ask him to stop the letters going out until they have an opt-out form included.

Nuance Communications, makers of the popular Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition software, have unveiled smartphone apps specifically developed for clinical professionals, reports MedGadget.

The Dragon Medical Mobile package provides transcription, medical voice search, and voice recording capabilities.

There's also a software development kit available to allow other firms to integrate Dragon Medical voice recognition ability into their own applications.

More than 80% of US physicians will have smartphones by 2012, up from 64% in 2009, and half of that group will use their phones for patient care, administrative functions like charge capture and even continuing medical education, according to a report from Manhattan Research that drills deeper into data first released last fall, says FierceMobileHealthcare.

"Handheld devices are becoming more and more useful to physicians, partly because of the boom in physician-oriented apps and portable content," says report author Monique Levy.

The BlackBerry still dominates among physicians and healthcare application developers, though the iPhone and Google Android are closing the gap quickly, thanks to their touchscreen functionality, she adds.