Microsoft on April 4 announced the formation of the BioIT Alliance, a cross-industry group created to enhance the ability to use and share biomedical data, at the Life Sciences Conference and Expo in Boston.

These lofty goals - among others - will be achieved through a public Web portal intended to serve as a “one-stop-shop“ for clinical trial information from all over Earth!

It's been said that the American automobile industry is linked in one way or another to one out of every six jobs in the United States. That's roughly 17% of the entire U.S. economy. All things considered that makes the Henry Ford Health System's E-Prescribe program much more than a local success story of healthcare process improvement through automation; it makes it a model for saving jobs worthy of national study.

Health Alliance Plan and Henry Ford Medical reported Wednesday that the year-old program, e-Prescribe, already has helped avoid potential drug complications and saved money by reducing adverse drug effects and increasing the use of generic prescriptions.

The fact is, all technology does is speed-up processes (or systems if you will), which is where the real opportunities for making improvements - and the real dangers of blind faith in automation - lie.