public health

See the following -

Congress Dishes Out HIT Budgets, Interoperability Probes

Anthony Brino | Government Health IT | December 22, 2014

Ten years after the creation of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, amid record partisan discord, lawmakers are trying to address problems they see in the direction of health IT’s evolution...

Read More »

Congress Passes Legislation Authorizing Critical Biodefense Programs

Press Release | Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense | June 5, 2019

The House yesterday passed the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness and Advancing Innovation Act. The bill reauthorizes existing statute governing public health efforts at the Department of Health and Human Services. Additions made by the bill - some of which were recommended by the Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense - address biodetection, hospital preparedness, medical countermeasures and response. Many of these programs will enable HHS to better defend the nation against biological threats. Both chambers of Congress have passed the bill, and it will now go to President Trump for signature.

Read More »

Connecting Patient Data Solving Healthcare Interoperability and the ONC Blockchain Challenge

Peter B. Nichol | CIO | August 24, 2016

Interoperability is an old concept dating back to the eighth century BC. Society has been struggling for centuries with the idea of combining individual parts or components to create a whole unit. However, interoperability with healthcare only came about in published works 23 years ago, in 1993. More recently, in 2013, HIMSS defined of healthcare interoperability as “the ability of different information technology systems and software applications to communicate, exchange data and use the information that has been exchanged”...

Read More »

Cornell Tech Professor Pries Open Medicine

Irina Ivanova | Crain's New York Business | November 6, 2013

Deborah Estrin, who founded Open mHealth, wants to build apps that capture people's everyday activities and give doctors insight into patient health. Read More »

Coronavirus and the Recurring Mistake of Fighting the Wrong Wars

What do the coronavirus and Navy ships have in common? For that matter, what do our military spending and our healthcare spending have in common? More than you might think, and it boils down to this: we spend too much for too little, in large part because we tend to always be fighting the wrong wars.I started thinking about this a couple weeks ago due to a WSJ article about the U.S. Navy's "aging and fragmented technology." An internal Navy strategy memo warned that the Navy is "under cyber siege" by foreign adversaries, leaking information "like a sieve." It grimly pointed out...

Read More »

Coronavirus Lessons From the Asteroid That Didn't Hit Earth

Benny Peiser and Andrew Monfort | Wall Street Journal | April 2, 2020

London: The coronavirus pandemic has dramatically demonstrated the limits of scientific modeling to predict the future. The most consequential coronavirus model, produced by a team at Imperial College London, tipped the British government, which had until then pursued a cautious strategy, into precipitate action, culminating in the lockdown under which we are all currently laboring. With the Imperial team talking in terms of 250,000 to 510,000 deaths in the U.K. and social media aflame with demands for something to be done, Prime Minister Boris Johnson had no other option. But last week, a team from Oxford University put forward an alternative model of how the pandemic might play out, suggesting a much less frightening future and a speedy end to the current nightmare.

Read More »

Could Opening Up The Doors To The World’s Medical Research Save Healthcare?

John Willinsky | The Health Care Blog | May 3, 2013

What if you had access to all of the medical research in the world? Or better yet, what if the physician treating your particularly complex or rare condition had access to the latest research? Or what if a public health organization in your community could access that research to inform policymakers of measures to advance public health? Read More »

Creating a Knowledge Infrastructure for the ‘Learning Health System’

David Raths | KM World | September 14, 2017

The idea that the healthcare industry can study the data being created in electronic health records (EHR) to foster ongoing improvement is not a new one, but it is gaining momentum. A “learning health system” is one that commits to the use of data as a byproduct of care for continuous learning. Clinicians and health system researchers want to tackle perhaps their industry’s most significant knowledge management challenge: how to capture the results of research into clinical best practices and more quickly feed it back to doctors and nurses at the point of care...

Read More »

Cures Act EHR Reporting Program Draft Measures—What this Means for Public Health

As part of the ONC Health IT Certification Program, Congress mandated the establishment of an Electronic Health Record (EHR) Reporting Program to help determine the effectiveness of the program. The first step toward implementation was the development of an initial set of CEHRT developer metrics which were released in draft form in December 2021. When finalized, these metrics will represent data that EHR vendors will have to report to ONC as a Condition and Maintenance of Certification. The initial focus of the metrics developed was interoperability, and public health was one of four categories considered.

Dallas Hospital Had The Ebola Screening Machine That The Military Is Using In Africa

Patrick Tucker | Nextgov.com | October 17, 2014

The military is using an Ebola screening machine that could have diagnosed the Ebola cases in Texas far faster, but government guidelines prevent hospitals from using it to actually screen for Ebola...

Read More »

Data Management for Large-scale COVID-19 Immunization: This is all not as simple as it seems

There is a global race for the development of a vaccine for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. Finding a vaccine that works and receives approval is only part of the process. There are a series of other steps that need to be taken so that the vaccine can be delivered. These include the mass production of the vaccine, shipment, administration and record-keeping. This may be even more complex as there may be several vaccines. In this article we review some of these issues with a particular focus on the United States.

Read More »

DeSalvo Sets Her Sights On Big Data

Diana Manos | HealthcareITNews | April 11, 2014

ONC chief Karen DeSalvo said it’s time for ONC to drive healthcare beyond the meaningful use of electronic health records toward the use of big data. “We have done a great job in the past ten years to get where we are, but I am really excited about the next decade to advance this notion to get data beyond meaningful use and advancing interoperability,” she said Thursday in a keynote on Capitol Hill.

Read More »

Developing Nations Improving Health Communication Through the Use of DHIS2 (Part 1)

DHIS2 implementations are spreading steadily among national health services in developing countries as well as among international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working to improving health in the developing world through the use of health information technology. As an open source solution, DHIS2 offers developing countries the advantage of adopting a cost-effective and flexible solution for aggregate statistical data collection, validation, analysis, management, and presentation as well as for data sharing between healthcare professionals and facilities. Organizations and individuals who work with humanitarian software solutions will need to know what DHIS2 is, how it works, and how it might be implemented by national health services and other health-related projects across the globe...

Read More »

DHS Tries Monitoring Social Media For Signs Of Biological Attacks

Aliya Sternstein | Nextgov | November 9, 2012

The Homeland Security Department has commissioned Accenture to test technology that mines open social networks for indications of pandemics, according to the vendor. Read More »

Disease Detectives Are Solving Fewer Foodborne Illness Cases

Eliza Barclay | The Salt | April 7, 2014

Recall, if you will, some of the biggest foodborne illness outbreaks of the past decade. There was the nasty of listeria from cantaloupe in 2011 that killed 33 people. And the ugly Salmonella Heidelberg from Foster Farms chicken [...] But according to a released Monday by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been reporting and solving fewer and fewer outbreaks over the past decade. Read More »