Morning Headlines 4/29/14

Merck Teams With Electronic Health Record Provider Practice Fusion To Improve Patient Health

Merck partners with Practice Fusion to bring EHR-based immunization reminder tools into physician practices. The partnership will provide physicians with the added ability to track immunization rates at the population level, and automatically send immunization reminders to patients.

What Do Physicians Read (and Ignore) in Electronic Progress Notes?

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst studying the eye movements of physicians as they read electronic notes find that the clinical narrative within the impression and plan section of the note was nearly always carefully read, but that the remainder of the note was only quickly scanned.

Reading Pain in a Human Face

Researchers with the Institute for Neural Computation have created software tool that can outperform humans at differentiating real pain from faked pain by analyzing facial expressions. In the study, participants were asked to watch a video showing subjects expressing either real pain or  faked pain. The participants were only able to correctly identify real pain 55 percent of the time, but the computer program could accurately identify real pain 85 percent of the time.