Microsoft Corp. today announced a strategic collaboration with RelayHealth, McKesson Corp.’s connectivity business, to accelerate and improve the relationship between doctors and patients. Together, Microsoft HealthVault and RelayHealth will enable affordable patient connectivity with doctors’ offices and hospitals so patients can have security-enhanced, easy online access to medical care, information and records.

Change can be difficult. It also can be rewarding. In the case of a medical school culture, change can have important consequences for what students learn and what type of physicians they ultimately become. Successfully altering an institution’s culture can be accomplished without massive amounts of funding or strict administrative edicts, say researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine.

Providing patients with e-mail access to their surgeon appears to improve communication without affecting patient satisfaction, according to a report in the February issue of Archives of Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

More than three decades after the shutdown of the notorious Tuskegee study, a team of Johns Hopkins physicians has found that Tuskegee’s legacy of blacks’ mistrust of physicians and deep-seated fear of harm from medical research persists and is largely to blame for keeping much-needed African Americans from taking part in clinical trials.

Physicians who score poorly on patient-physician communication skills exams are far more likely to generate patient complaints to regulatory authorities, says a new study led by McGill University's Robyn Tamblyn and published in the September 5 issue of JAMA.

Canadian physicians who score poorly on the patient-physician communication portion of the national licensing examination receive more complaints to regulatory authorities on issues such as communication or quality-of-care problems, according to an article in the September 5 issue of JAMA, a theme issue on medical education.

A systematic review of studies published over the past four decades has confirmed that good doctor-patient communication makes a difference not only in patient satisfaction but in patient outcomes including resolution of chronic headaches, changes in emotional states, lower blood sugar values in diabetics, improved blood pressure readings in hypertensives, and other important health indicators.