Merck will join Lilly in disclosing almost all physician payments. The company said it supports pending federal legislation to require the disclosure of payments. Here’s the release and an article.

Microsoft is encountering a variety of problems. Business Week recently noted that HP is working on a shadow operating system, possibly to power a laptop. Intel, another Microsoft ally, is beefing up efforts to use Linux. Intuit abandoned a marketing campaign mentioning support for Vista. GE, meanwhile, just selected internet-based office software from Zoho, which it found superior to tools from Google. Finally, we lament the growing usage of the ill-conceived “docx” format, which was inspired by European bureaucrats and marks the end of easy transfers of Word documents. Not everyone agrees with us; some people actually like the accursed format.

Electronic health record systems will be important in emergencies, this story says. The number of reasons for EHRs seems to be proliferating. But actual EHR users themselves are seldom singing the praises of the technology.

The thoughtful Chris Connor joined the Phoenix Data Systems division of BioImaging Technologies as director of product development, leaving a prominent role as an IDC analyst writing about electronic data capture and other systems. “PDS has consistently proven its ability to deliver the benefits of EDC to the entire marketplace, not only those late stage studies with very large budgets. No other supplier matches PDS’ record in this area,” said Connor. Here’s the release and a ClinPage article with his thoughts on EDC and contract research organizations.

This is a webcast about information overload, which the presenter describes as a problem of not blocking out information.

The pharmaceutical industry puts less than half of all clinical trials into medical journals, England’s Guardian newspaper reports. “The people who participate in a trial have a right to expect that their participation and their data will be made available publicly so that people can take whatever decisions seem appropriate in the light of that information,” said Iain Chalmers, director of the James Lind Library in Oxford and a founder of the Cochrane Collaboration. The research originated in PLoS, an open source journal. The authors speculate that new FDAAA requirements to post abbreviated trial results in online databases could exacerbate the problem. The logic is that those databases might lead sponsors not to bother to use scientific journals to discuss trials that are already listed online.

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