SMITH BRAIN TRUST -- Doctors have many concerns about online crowdsourced ratings, which are intended to make patients better-informed consumers of health care, but this is a big one: They worry that complainers will be the most outspoken contributors to rating sites, skewing scores and resulting in a kind of heckler's veto.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST -- The introduction of Craigslist led to an increase in HIV-infection cases of 13.5 percent in Florida over a four-year period, according to a new study conducted at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith of Business. The estimated medical costs for those patients will amount to $710 million over the course of their lives.

Ritu's research influences the shift to electronic medial records.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST -- U.S. News and World Report recently explored the question of whether wearable fitness devices and smartphones were complementary products — or competitive ones. As fitness apps on phones get more sophisticated, must Fitbit fade?

How can we use technology to advance our health care system? This has been a commonly asked question in the medical community lately and one that a group of leading experts in the field gathered to discuss at the fifth annual Workshop on Health IT and Economics (WHITE) held Oct. 10-11 in Alexandria, VA, presented by the Center for Health Information and Decision Systems (CHIDS) in the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business.

Smith a Catalyst to Better Performing State-Run Exchanges  States’ health insurance exchanges recovered faster than the federal government's health insurance marketplace after both stumbled out of the gate last fall.

Technology is opening the "black box" of hospital operations to researchers, while patient empowerment and groundbreaking, patient-centered and patient-powered research networks loom to tackle health challenges from obesity to rare diseases. These topics were among the focal points of the fourth annual Workshop on Health IT and Economics (WHITE) held Nov. 15-16 in Washington D.C., and presented by the Center for Health Information and Decision Systems (CHIDS) in the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business.

Research by Ritu Agarwal and Gordon Gao

Ritu Agarwal, founder and director of the Center for Health Information and Decision Systems and professor and the Dean’s Chair of Information Systems, will discuss her recent study, “The Benefits of Combining Data with Empathy,” in an e-chat hosted by All Analytics, an online community for information management, business intelligence and analytics. Follow the conversation, starting 3 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 14.

College Park, Md. - Oct. 1, 2012 - Leading researchers representing 40 institutions worldwide will present and discuss their work in the third Workshop on Health IT and Economics (WHITE) on Friday and Saturday, Oct. 5-6 at the Key Bridge Marriott in Arlington, Va.