Going digital: State's hospitals begin to link electronically

Massachusetts is taking the first steps toward creating an electronic network that would give doctors from Williamstown to Provincetown instant access to patients' medical records no matter where in the state the patient came from. Currently, most private practices still keep medical records on paper, making the sharing of potentially critical information such as drug allergies and family histories difficult.

Bringing the state's health records into the digital age is no small task; establishing a statewide system has been estimated to cost at least $1 billion.

But first things first: the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative, a nonprofit group leading the statewide digital effort, will shortly introduce state-of-the-art software to Brockton, Newburyport, and the northern Berkshires. Hospitals, physician practices, nursing homes, community health centers, and long-term care facilities will participate in this pilot program, which is set to launch by summer and will last two to three years.

EMILY SWEENEY

New medical director returns to his birthplace
Even as Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center will lose three key neurosurgeons July 1, a respected kidney doctor and researcher will take over as chairman of its department of medicine. Dr. Mark Zeidel, the department chairman at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, will run the department of medicine at the Harvard teaching hospital.

It's a real return to his roots; Zeidel was born at Beth Israel Hospital Sept. 3, 1954.

But the challenges in Boston, where a half-dozen academic medical centers compete for patients, will be different than the ones he's faced Pittsburgh, at least on the business side.

''We're the dominant health system here, we basically overwhelmed our competition," he said. ''So it wasn't easy to pry me out of this situation."

Zeidel said he will develop a comprehensive plan after he arrives, but that he wants to find ways to convince more medical residents to pursue academic careers, and to attract more patients to certain outpatient and overnight services.
LIZ KOWALCZYK

Children's Hospital touts improved fetal heart surgery
Three years ago, when doctors at Children's Hospital first were successful at threading a needle through a mother's belly to operate on her fetus' malformed heart, Dr. Wayne Tworetzky called it ''the science fiction procedure." Now, the approach that once seemed otherworldly is ready for prime time.

Doctors in Children's Advanced Fetal Care Center will host an international conference this month, which will include video clips of their most recent fetal heart surgery case. Doctors and nurses around the world will be able to view the video over the Internet.

At the conference, to be held April 29 and 30, the team will discuss results from the cardiac procedure and other interventions that they've done while babies were still inside their mothers or shortly after birth, 83 in total since the hospital formed its fetal care center.
LIZ KOWALCZYK

The export of Boston science and medicine
Researchers and teachers are finding new ways to take Boston science and medicine global without ever leaving the 617 area code.

Last week, Tufts University's Health Science Library unveiled a website (http://spiral.tufts.edu) that offers detailed health information on diseases from asthma to HIV in seven Asian languages: Chinese, Hmong, Khmer. Korean, Laotian, Thai, and Vietnamese. Similarly, the Harvard Center for Cancer Prevention just started a Spanish language version of Your Disease Risk (www.cuidardesusalud.harvard.edu) allowing Spanish speakers to calculate their risk of developing 12 kinds of cancer along with other conditions such as heart disease and osteoporosis.

Finally, five labs at MIT now offer university students in Uganda, Tanzania, and Nigeria the chance to carry out sophisticated engineering and science experiments over the Internet as part of the ILab initiative to offer more MIT experiments over the Web.

SCOTT ALLEN