Earlier this year patients of Kaiser Permanente in California got the option of purchasing a portable version on their medical records. For five dollars, each patient received a password protected flash drive that contained an abridged version of his or her medical history.

Recently Aurora St. Luke’s Medical Center in Milwaukee Twittered a bi-lateral knee surgery and earlier this year a surgeon with the Henry Ford Hospital Twittered a robotic partial nephrectomy. To be sure, both of these events drew huge interest from both the media and the Twitterverse, but they beg the question can and should Twitter be something that physicians use everyday?

Several Practice Management software packages are adding Physicians Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI) compliance to their software packages. The Physicians Quality Reporting Initiative, also known as pay for performance, is an incentive program instituted by Medicare. This program is now a permanent program but the incentive payments are only authorized through 2010. That is not to say that additional incentive payments will not continue in the coming years.