Aggregated News
The days of scrawled doctor’s notes are slowly coming to a close. In the United States, 93 percent of hospitals are now using at least some electronic medical records and 2.2 percent have given up paper records completely, according to the consulting firm HIMSS Analytics.
The federal government has been pushing for electronic medical records for a decade, arguing that they will improve health care and bring down costs. That is still a matter of debate. Critics charge that the system is hobbled by poorly designed software and that some hospitals are using electronic medical records to bill more for the same services.
But a new study suggests that electronic medical records may have another, entirely different use: as a Rosetta Stone for our DNA. Researchers are using them to trace links between genes and disease.
It has been 13 years since scientists first published the rough draft of the human genome and yet they are still just beginning to work out how our DNA influences our health. Most insights in recent years have come from so-called genome-wide...
The federal government has been pushing for electronic medical records for a decade, arguing that they will improve health care and bring down costs. That is still a matter of debate. Critics charge that the system is hobbled by poorly designed software and that some hospitals are using electronic medical records to bill more for the same services.
But a new study suggests that electronic medical records may have another, entirely different use: as a Rosetta Stone for our DNA. Researchers are using them to trace links between genes and disease.
It has been 13 years since scientists first published the rough draft of the human genome and yet they are still just beginning to work out how our DNA influences our health. Most insights in recent years have come from so-called genome-wide...