Each month TecTrends Reporters survey developments across the tech industry, and this month I thumb through the TecTrend Reporter on healthcare.

The articles summarized in this issue range from current clinical developments to legal and regulatory issues and the growing crossover of the healthcare and computer sectors.

• Scientific American looks at the H1N1 flu, commonly called ’swine flu,’ and the gap it has revealed in our ability to track disease patterns among livestock. 
• Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology reports that the pharma industry is now betting heavily on RNA interference (RNAi) technology to offer subtler, more precisely targeted drugs. A snag: Delivering these drugs to their targets has proven challenging.

Washington’s political fights do not figure heavily in these articles – anyone who wants a dose of healthcare politics will have to go elsewhere. (Don’t worry, politics is easy to find on the Web.)

But some articles here do touch on the real world issues and concerns that have thrust healthcare into the political arena.

• In Technology Review, Andy Kessler has tough words for the healthcare industry on the subject of digitizing health records. The industry has been in no rush to digitize, he argues, because the current chaotic system helps to ‘keep medicine’s lucrative business model hidden.’

• Villains are harder to find in Clinical Laboratory News, which looks at the debate in laboratories over testing for deficiency in prohormone Vitamin D. But there is also a back story here involving research findings, the mass media, and the public.

Meanwhile the tech industry is looking for a piece of the healthcare sector.

• Also from Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, Microsoft’s health solutions group has grown from four to 400 members. This year Microsoft released its Amalga Life Sciences 2009 solution package for life sciences research information.

• From Health Management Technology, software as a service (SaaS) is finding a home in the healthcare sector, with NYU’s Langone Medical Center choosing an SaaS system called ePREMIS to straighten out a muddle of legacy administrative and accounting systems.

These are only a handful of the 33 articles conveniently summarized in this month’s TecTrends Reporter on Healthcare. Read the whole Reporter to give you a big picture view of the whirlwhind of activity taking place across the healthcare technology spectrum.

The August TecTrends Reporter on New Media is one of them, summarizing and indexing 26 noteworthy articles relating to some aspect of new media. TecTrends Reporter tells you in a nutshell what the trade and business press is saying now about new media.

We choose the most useful articles, but our software determines the printing sequence. Glancing at the contents page my eye was caught by a fortuitous sequence of titles:

The New Maelstrom of Social Media
Everyone’s Social (Already)
You’re Not Social (Enough)
All (Almost) on the Internet

Together they have a Delphic quality. If you could tune in on the collective buzz of everyone who follows technology, and distill it down, this is what you would hear. Then, as with the oracle, you’d have to make sense of it. But that is what TecTrends Reporters are for.

Everyone has discovered social media. One author grumps about ‘Digg and the Me Generation,’ but businesses are finding an unexpected side effect to the spread of social media: People are talking about them and their products, and they have a chance to join in the conversation. The article just ahead of the quartet I listed, ‘The New Interaction of Social Media’, takes up the theme of using social media to engage with customers. This theme continues with the middle pair of the quartet, ”Everyone’s Social (Already),’ while ‘You’re Not Social (Enough)’ looks at one firm that is fostering its own internal social network.

The last of our quartet, ‘All (Almost) on the Internet,’ is not about social media but the spread of freely available online information, in this case, high quality scientific information. This is on the bright side of the other big story in the world of media:

What is going to happen to print? The first article, ‘The Future of Reading’ looks at another interesting bright side: Many authors are finding that making their books available online helps them sell more print copies, not fewer. Online release triggers online discussion, and the discussion brings in more readers. But newspapers are struggling to cope with the world of online free news. One title, ‘Papers Try to Bridge Print, Web Revenue Gap,’ tells the story in a nutshell; the article describes some of the ways papers are trying to make online content pay. Another article also tells its story up front; ‘Internet Paid Content: Back to the Future?’ (Perhaps, says the author, but first the content providers need to learn what people are willing to pay for.)

It isn’t all social media and print. These are the themes dominating current discussion of new media, but other discussions are going on, and TecTrends Reporter looks in on them. ‘Web 2.0 and the Law,’ looks at the implications of Web 2.0 technology for law enforcement. Another article has a title too long to blog, but shows how application programming interfaces (APIs) can serve as a marketing tool to extend the reach of messages and product information.

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