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The Obama administration wants consumers to report medical mistakes and unsafe practices by doctors, hospitals, pharmacists and others who provide treatment.

“Currently there is no mechanism for consumers to report information about patient safety events.”

“Patient reports could complement and enhance reports from providers and thus produce a more complete and accurate understanding of the prevalence and characteristics”

The right technology, medical experts say, can potentially overcome two major hurdles to the adoption of electronic health records by doctors: cost and complexity.

The government plans to spend $19 billion in incentive payments — up to $44,000 per doctor, and gave practices five years to adopt electronic records before penalties begin.

"This technology brings a potential to have a renaissance of medical diagnosis,"

She also said she believes that at some point Watson will have the speech-recognition capability to actually go into an exam room and listen to a patient talk about their symptoms while it runs through their medical records

"The physician will make the decisions but Watson can help."

It’s pretty hard to do anything beyond a gift. It’s more like organ donation, where you don’t get to decide where the organs go. What I’m working on is basically a donation, not a conditional gift.

people’s attitudes toward risk and benefit change depending on their circumstances. Their own context really affects what they think is risky and what they think isn’t risky.

I believe that the early data donors are likely to be people for whom there isn’t a lot of risk perceived because the health system already knows that they’re sick. The health system is already denying them coverage, denying their requests for PET scans, denying their requests for access to care. That’s based on actuarial tables, not on their personal data. It’s based on their medical history.

By using an iPad, a doctor can assess a patient’s electronic health record, previous medical images, allergies and other health issues before the patient even arrives at the hospital. Prescriptions can be changed electronically and clipboards will become a thing of the past.

In Kenya, if you charged women just 50p for an insecticide-treated bednet (one of the most effective low-cost prophylactics against malaria) demand dropped 75 per cent. Uptake of deworming drugs—an important factor in child development—dropped 80 per cent if a small charge was applied. And in October 2005, the Bamako initiative received a fatal blow from a paper in the British Medical Journal. The study took epidemiological data from 20 African countries and projected what would happen if user fees were removed. The conclusion was that, each year, the lives of 233,000 children under five would be saved.

“With the right software that is cloud-based, the iPad is going to be transformational in health care,”

The brothers are also betting that Internet technology and Apple’s iPad can make electronic records far easier to use and less expensive

"Dr. Watson," says he expects the computer, which can respond to questions with answers instead of data and spread sheets, to radically improve doctors' care of their patients.

Watson is expected to be able to take a patient's electronic medical records, digest them, summarize them for the doctor and point out any causes for concern, highlighting anything abnormal and warning about potential drug interactions.