The registry was launched January 26 and is available online on the AMA's Web site. The registry is intended to assist the federal government and the private sector in the coordination of medical efforts. It is open to all physicians.

Those wishing to offer their services can enter their specialty, availability, language skills, and previous disaster medicine experience.

"Practicing physicians, we need you," AMA President J. James Rohack, MD, wrote in a blog post announcing the registry. "Two weeks may have lapsed since devastation struck those in Haiti, but let's not forget the hundreds of thousands who are still suffering and need our help."

The American Medical Association, other physician organizations and seniors groups were hoping to follow health reform passage with a long-term solution to the Medicare physician payment system, which is primed for a 21.2% cut starting March 1. But momentum on the broader reform effort came to a grinding halt when Massachusetts state Sen. Scott Brown defeated state Attorney General Martha Coakley in a Jan. 19 special election for the Senate seat vacated by the death of Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy last August.

Physicians increasingly are adopting electronic medical records systems, even before government economic incentives for doing so have kicked in. But a survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also found those doctors weren't yet doing a whole lot with the technology.

The CDC's National Center for Health Statistics said an estimated 43.9% of doctors are using full or partial EMRs, up from 34.8% in 2007 and 41.3% in 2008. The use of what was described as "fully functional" systems also went up from 3.8% in 2007 and 4.4% in 2008, to 6.3% in 2009. The survey did not include systems used for billing.

Experts said the survey showed that while more physicians are embracing health information technology, it's not a full embrace. Doctors are starting slowly, with individual functions such as electronic prescribing.

A faculty physician at the University of California, San Francisco, Medical Center received an e-mail last fall appearing to be from the hospital's information technology staff. The e-mail requested the doctor's login information in order to perform routine security upgrades to the system. Because it seemed like an ordinary request, the physician sent the information.

But that e-mail wasn't from his hospital's IT administrators. It was from a scammer, and by responding, the physician had unwittingly exposed the personal information of more than 600 of his patients.

This type of scam has become so common it's earned its own nickname: "spearphishing." Like phishing, this scam is carried out via a fictitious e-mail that looks legitimate. But unlike phishing, in which missives are sent to as many e-mail accounts as possible, spearphishing targets a specific population by posing as someone with whom the e-mail recipient routinely conducts business and exchanges information.

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The Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission, or MACPAC, will be chaired by Diane Rowland, ScD, executive director of the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured. The U.S. comptroller general appointed the panel's 17 members Dec. 23, 2009.

MACPAC was created by a provision of the Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act, signed by President Obama in February 2009. The act instructs the panel to examine the effect of Medicaid pay and other factors on the access and quality of care received by Medicaid and CHIP enrollees.

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