Morning Headlines 10/6/14

Facebook plots first steps into healthcare

Reuters reports that Facebook is exploring health care solutions, including disease-specific online support groups, and Facebook connected digital health apps.

Hewlett-Packard Plans to Break in Two

The Wall Street Journal reports that HP will split into two separate companies, with an announcement expected Monday. The company will split its personal-computer and printer business away as one entity, and establish the other with its corporate hardware and services operations. 

Clarification from Texas Health Resources

Texas Health Resources retracts an earlier statement it made blaming its EHR (Epic) for allowing an Ebola patient to be discharged after an ED physician failed to notice that nurses had documented recent West African travel in the system.

Ebola dropped-ball diagnosis linked to hospitals’ IT culture

Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush jumps at the opportunity to mention that if the country ran its health IT platform on the cloud then time sensitive alerts, like warning of recent West African travel in patients with flu-like symptoms, could be built into physician workflows at a national level very quickly, rather than at each individual hospital. He says, “I hope soon that nobody will be on enterprise software and these things will be managed by people across thousands of hospitals."