The current US healthcare system suffers from excessive bureaucracy and red tape-ism. Regulations have only made the care delivery process more complex with unnecessary delays and loss of productivity. The proposed shift to Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) was an attempt to bolster efficient practice methods that enable quality care delivery. Paper health records have long since become obsolete. Paper based documentation simply cannot match the growing requirements of our healthcare system. Inherent limitations along with system inefficiencies drive the costs up, whereas outcomes are far from satisfactory. Nearly 98,000 deaths are reported each year due to negligence and medical malpractice, thus medical errors are a huge cause for concern.

Before the CMS introduced the EMR stimulus program, it had turned its attention towards medical prescribing. Medication errors cause over 7,000 fatalities each year, hence it was imperative for the government to move towards a more efficient system in e-prescribing (eRx). ’It’s unfortunate but most of the medication errors are attributable to illegibility of the prescription note or miss spellings on the part of the provider’, says a pharmacologist. E-Prescribing reduces medication errors whilst improving accuracy and accountability.

1. "To stimulate creativity one must develop childlike inclination for play and the childlike desire for recognition." - Albert Einstein

2. "If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play." - John Cleese

3. "If you lose the power to laugh, you lose the power to think." - Clarence Darrow

4. "The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect, but by the play instinct arising from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the object it loves." - Carl Jung

5. "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny!'" - Isaac Asimov

Companion bills were introduced in Congress on April 25th of this year with little fanfare (particularly in comparison to the Leahy-Smith American Invents Act) but they have the potential to provide significant funding for university-related start-up companies.  The bills, H.R. 4720 and S. 2369, are entitled the "America Innovates Act of 2012" and are sponsored by Reps. Rush Holt (D-NJ) and Timothy Bishop (D-NY) in the House of Representatives and Sens. Frank Lautenberg, Jerrod Brown (D-OH), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) in the Senate.  They have been referred to their respective committees (the House Sub-Committee on Technology and Innovation and the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation), but to be frank it is unlikely that they will receive positive action in this election year.

New research published in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutritionsuggests that eating raisins may provide the same workout boost as sports chews.

Conducted by researchers at the University of California-Davis, the study evaluated the effects that natural versus commercial carbohydrate supplements have on endurance running performance. Runners depleted their glycogen stores in an 80-minute 75% V02 max run followed by a 5k time trial. Runners completed three randomized trials (raisins, chews and water only) separated by seven days. Findings included:

Those that ingested raisins or sports chews ran their 5k on average one minute faster than those that ingested only water Eating raisins and sports chews promoted higher carbohydrate oxidation compared to water only

Bob Dole’s 89th birthday on Sunday got me thinking about the significance of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 and the history (and future) of university-based innovation commercialization.  My first job after law school was working as an aide to the Director of Policy of Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign.  It was in that position that I first heard about Bayh-Dole and the simple idea behind it: give universities, rather than the federal government, the intellectual property and commercialization rights that result from federal research funding.

The impact of this bipartisan legislation has been transformative for American innovation and economic progress over the three decades since its passage.  At the time Bayh-Dole was enacted, the US government held over 28,000 patents, with less than 5% of those ever getting commercialized.  Since then many thousands of new products and companies have been created based on university research, including numerous critical healthcare advances such as synthetic penicillin, the hepatitis B vaccine, and key therapies for cancer and Crohn’s disease.

As the price of solar panels has plummeted, the amount of solar power being generated worldwide is soaring. Yet solar still accounts for less than 2 percent of the world's total electricity capacity. And small wonder. Each square meter of solar panel generates around 145 watts of electrical power, enough to turn on just two or three light bulbs.

That means you'd have to cover the National Mall in Washington, D.C. five or six times over to match the peak capacity of a large fossil-fuel power plant. What's more, every one of those panels needs to be installed by hand.

This week I'll be sharing some more new data on the geography of America's creative class. Nationwide, the creative class totals more than 40 million workers, more than a third of the total workforce, including professionals in the fields of science and technology, design and architecture, arts, entertainment and media, and healthcare, law, management and education.* Today, I start with state-level data.

The map above, by the Martin Prosperity Institute's Zara Matheson and based on data compiled by Kevin Stolarick, charts the creative class share of the workforce for the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Sean Parker recently launched a startup, Airtime, with his Napster cofounder Shawn Fanning.

Until recently, he wasn't sure he wanted to start another company. When you've had a mega success as an entrepreneur, like Parker did with Napster, it's hard to produce something that won't be a let down.

"The expectation thing definitely weighs on me," Parker tells Dealbook. "There’s a sort of fear of launching something and failing,” Parker thinks that's why so many entrepreneurs either become one-hit wonders or venture capitalists. Both, he says, are cop-outs.

Every entrepreneur’s first priority should be the alignment of interests across the range of constituents required for success – partners, investors, customers, vendors, and employees. The best are ones quickest and most willing to do the realignment on a continuous basis these days, as the market changes, customer interests change, and you learn from experience.

Alignment means everyone has complementary objectives, and everyone is executing on their objectives. These things change so fast these days that the primary role of the entrepreneur as CEO is to be the Master of Realignment. The details of this role are outlined in a new book “Rapid Realignment,” by the experts in this space, George Labovitz and Victor Rosansky.

Taking time off is critical to refresh and recharge yourself. However, when it comes to vacation time, considerations are quite different for those who are self-employed versus company employees with paid vacation time.

For starters, when you’re self-employed, you’re typically paid based on your productivity. Taking one week off means no pay check. That cost needs to be factored into any vacation budget.

Chevy Chase-based New Enterprise Associates has closed on what appears to be the largest venture fund in history at $2.6 billion, the firm announced Wednesday.

NEA’s 14th fund gives the VC titan a fresh pool of capital to inject into tech companies along a wide array of stages, sectors and geographies, and comes two and a half years after the firm closed on a thirteenth fund that was only slightly less mammoth. NEA is among the most prolific startup funders in the D.C. region, both in biotech and information technology.

I did an interview yesterday in Buffalo, NY where I was the past couple days for the launch of the Z80 incubator. Grove Potter, the Business Editor for the Buffalo News, interviewed me for something like an hour. It was a fun talk.

At one point he asked me about the issue of entrepreneurs giving up control of their companies to VCs. It's an interesting issue and one that I think is not well understood.

How time flies.

Just last year, many of us in the Baltimore technology community were talking about whether our city needed an accelerator program. The Emerging Technology Center, with the help of the Abell Foundation, stepped up and provided one.

The first class of four companies graduate tomorrow. And one of the graduates, NoBadGift.com, is moving out to San Francisco for three months to be a part of the NewMe accelerator program. Great news for that team of three entrepreneurs.

The Cleveland Clinic and Ohio State University agreed yesterday to join forces in fast-tracking the commercialization of health-care technology, signaling a desire to compete less and collaborate more.

Officials billed the partnership as Ohio’s largest medical-commercialization network. The two institutions are among the largest of the state’s centers of medical-related research and development based on National Institutes of Health funding.

“There really can be no more significant alliance than this teaming of our two institutions up and down I-71,” Christopher Coburn told a crowd at OSU’s Technology Commercialization office on N. High Street. Coburn is executive director of Cleveland Clinic Innovations, the health system’s corporate-venture branch.

Facebook’s (FB: 28.63, +0.18, +0.63%) $16 billion initial public offering was supposed to be a crowning achievement that would open the investing floodgates to early-stage technology firms.

Two months after that debacle, it’s become clear the Facebook IPO and the deepening eurozone debt crisis have combined to significantly erode confidence among Bay Area venture capitalists.

Confidence in the second quarter dipped 8.4% to 3.47 on a 5-point scale in the Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist Confidence Index, which was released on Tuesday.

New York Times best-selling author Seth Godin is a fan. So is novelist Bret Easton Ellis. Ben Folds embraced it to bankroll his new album. Amanda Palmer has used it to raise over a million dollars and game studio Ouya just cashed in to the tune of $5.4M and counting. No longer the domain of the struggling indie artist relying on populist largesse, crowdfunding has gone high-profile. In the last year alone, Kickstarter has had seven projects that topped $1M (Palmer’s was the first). But when celebrity or corporate content creators move in, do they squeeze the little guy out? Are we seeing  the gentrification of grassroots creative funding?

Imagine a kayak commute, or taking a break to try out the office climbing wall. At one San Francisco office of the company that includes The North Face, employees are kept happy by being kept active and outdoorsy. 

What’s your dream office? Is it the one that doesn’t exist at all, or maybe the one that encourages you to work from home? If you fantasize about bouldering on your lunch break--and appreciate being in a zero-waste, net zero-energy environment--you might want to take a look at the soon-to-be-completed space in the slideshow above: the new Alameda, Calif. headquarters of VF Corporation's outdoor and action sports coalition brands, which include The North Face, Lucy, and Jansport.

The country’s top pharmaceutical companies are under pressure to keep their pipelines filled with promising new drugs, which means they will continue tapping start-up companies for breakthrough ideas.

But while the big drug companies might be in an acquisitive mood, they are making young companies work harder than they did in the past to get acquired, structuring deals in such a way that they continue to hold the cards even while shelling out big money for new innovations, a new report says.

Entrepreneur’s Vacation Day: A working day on which work doesn’t interfere with the work you really need to be working on.  – Mark Talaba

It started in January, when Paul and Jenny, our intrepid Client Services Team, put up the calendar. I mean an old-fashioned one that you can write on. Then they penciled in their well-planned vacations. Did I mention they are a team? They always coordinate with each other so business needs are never left unmet. And they are young enough to enjoy air travel, and sophisticated enough to have been places I have little desire to see, other than on a National Geographic special.

But for me, a vacation day is best spent reading or writing. What makes it a vacation day is that I’m probably doing it horizontally. With iced coffee on the side. And no phones ringing.

One of the few things that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney can agree on is that our economy is still struggling to regain its strength. Stubborn unemployment and sluggish growth at home combined with a slowing China and a dysfunctional eurozone have cast a dark shadow on America’s eternal optimism. The media favors negative news and the 24/7 cycle of gloom and doubt can be dispiriting.

We are always looking for the economic points of light around the globe and strive to provide a counterpoint to the pervasive pessimism. As Warren Buffett once said, “It’s never paid to bet against America. We come through things, but it’s not always a smooth ride.”