As part of a pilot test, Cambridge, MA-based Harvard Community Health Plan has patients in about 150 households using home computers to receive medical advice and general health information. The system should better educate patients, improve quality of care and lower costs, according to its developers.

It's been long known that EDs in the nation's largest cities routinely provide non-emergent primary care. But a new study by the AHA and several allied hospital associations has found that a very high proportion of ED visits in each of the four communities studied could have been handled outside the ED.