health care

Dodged the flu this year? A lot of people have, and some companies aren’t too happy about it.

The CDC’s FluView map shows that this year’s influenza season has been a slow-starter. While the flu has picked up in recent weeks, sporadic reports of flu were the most common on the agency’s flu map during in December.

Plenty of companies are working on better engines to search the Web for health information. Now insurance heavyweight Aetna is making it personal.

The company is rolling out a search service that takes into account a member’s personal health information, including past diagnoses and health-plan details.

Small businesses are leading the national retreat from employer-based health coverage.

More than half of the 6 million Americans who lost health insurance between 2000 and 2006 worked at small companies or were self-employed, a recent Health Affairs online article reported.

Small and rural hospitals can have a tough time keeping patients. Many will drive an hour or two to the nearest city for all but the most basic — or most urgent — care. And the sickest patients may have to be shipped out anyway, to reach the specialists that might save them.

What if high-tech tools could bring the big-city expertise to their patients instead?

When you’re navigating around something as delicate as the brain — not to mention cutting things out of it — depth perception helps a lot.

After 17 babies got overdoses of the blood thinner heparin at a Texas hospital, a hospital-quality group pointed to the incident as one more reason to push for computerized systems for ordering drugs within hospitals.