White House

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Experts Warn Of Antimicrobial Resistance, Additional Threats To National Biosecurity

Claudia Adrien | Homeland Preparedness News | June 28, 2019

Dr. Asha George...was among a panel of experts testifying about the state of U.S. preparedness for biological attacks and infectious disease pandemics. The experts agreed that a range of factors affect our country's ability to fight these threats, including weakened or fragmented federal oversight, limited incentives for research and development, and a lack of preparedness at the local level to protect vulnerable populations. "In short, the nation is not prepared for biological outbreaks, acts of bioterrorism, biological warfare of accidental releases with catastrophic consequences," George said. "We are talking about catastrophic events that affect the function of our entire society."

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Health Exchange Website Failures Were Both Predicted And Predictable

Katherine McIntire Peters | Nextgov | October 10, 2013

Who knew it could be so difficult to build an effective, user-friendly website capable of efficiently serving up complex information for millions of users? Quite a few people, actually. And that’s why the Obama administration’s bungling of the most public aspect of its signature policy initiative is so baffling. [...] Read More »

White House Vastly Overstates Federal Transparency, Auditors Report

Joseph Marks | Nextgov | October 30, 2013

The U.S. has only completed half the commitments it made two years ago under an international government transparency agreement, an independent auditor found recently. Read More »

'Get the Insurance Companies the Hell Out' of Healthcare System

Jon Queally | Common Dreams | October 25, 2016

Right-wingers like Charles Krauthammer don't "think anybody should buy it"—and too many Democrats actually don't want to talk about it—but that doesn't mean advocates for a single-payer or 'Medicare for All' healthcare system aren't responding to news about rising insurance premiums for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) with renewed demands. Just weeks away from national elections, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) made financial and political news late Monday by announcing the average premiums for plans under the ACA (aka Obamacare) will rise significantly for many consumers in 2017...

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20 Orlando Health Workers Watched For MERS Symptoms

John Lantigua | Palm Beach Post | May 13, 2014

Nineteen employees at two Orlando hospitals who came in contact with a man infected with the rare MERS virus were sent home under quarantine and are being closely monitored for symptoms. An additional worker who displayed symptoms was put in isolation in the hospital...

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7 Patent Reforms The White House Should Have Proposed

Simon Phipps | InfoWorld | June 7, 2013

The president's follow-up to his frank condemnation of patent trolls is welcome, but we need more Read More »

Accelerating Identification and Tracking of Pandemic Disease Outbreaks

A national biosurveillance program requires the collaboration of multiple federal, state and local agencies to provide a comprehensive view of a health-related event. Bitscopic's Praedico™ biosurveillance platform breaks down the data barriers among organizations with an extensible architecture that can incorporate any kind of data. The platform also delivers high performance by incorporating the latest technologies such as big data, NoSQL databases, and machine learning. Read More »

After Long Delay, Obama Declines To Rule On Petition Calling For Firing Of DOJ Officials Over Aaron Swartz’s Suicide

Brian Fung and Andrea Peterson | The Washington Post | January 8, 2015

The White House has declined to rule on a petition that called for the firing of two Justice Department officials over the handling of a controversial court case involving Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist who committed suicide in 2013 after being accused of hacking into a university network...

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Amazingly Rapid Growth in Use of EHR Systems Across the U.S.

Jeanne Lambrew | White House Blog | May 24, 2013

Until the President made investments in health information technology by signing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, our health care system ran largely on paper. Read More »

Analysis: Obamacare Can't Fail

Sam Baker | Nextgov | January 6, 2014

The standard of success for the Affordable Care Act keeps getting weaker. Whether in enrollment numbers, federal savings, or the workings of its website, the White House has repeatedly lowered the bar for the law when it has missed expectations, replacing initial standards with ones that are lower, squishier, or nonexistent. Read More »

Biden Announces Major Open Initiatives At Cancer Moonshot Summit

Press Release | The White House | June 28, 2016

Today, the Cancer Moonshot is hosting a summit at Howard University, in Washington, D.C. as part of a national day of action that also includes more than 270 events in communities across the United States.  Vice President Joe Biden will join over 350 researchers, oncologists and other care providers, data and technology experts, patients, families, and patient advocates, among others, will come together at Howard University.  They will be joined by more than 6,000 individuals at events in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and Guam.  This is the first time a group this expansive and diverse will meet under a government charge is to double the rate of progress in our understanding, prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and care of cancer...

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Biden Gives a Peek at What’s to Come for Cancer Moonshot

Anna Edney | Bloomberg Politics | June 29, 2016

A corporate-government partnership to improve U.S. veterans’ access to personalized cancer treatments will highlight a nationwide series of gatherings and events Wednesday detailing of Vice President Joe Biden’s “Cancer Moonshot” program. IBM Corp. will donate access to its “Watson” supercomputer -- best known for beating human champions on the television game show “Jeopardy!” -- to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The supercomputer will help provide facilitate oncology treatment for those who have served in the U.S. military, according to a statement from the White House...

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Big Brother Would Like To Warn You About Big Brother, Inc.

Philip Bump | The Wire | May 2, 2014

...The new report, titled "Big Data: Seizing opportunities, preserving values," tries to flesh out what those private-sector ramifications might be...The report is the White House "hoping to move the national debate over privacy beyond the National Security Agency’s surveillance activities to the practices of companies like Google and Facebook," as the paper puts it...

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Biodefense Takes Center Stage at House Oversight Hearing

Jack Rodgers | Courthouse News Service | June 26, 2019

Is the nation ready to defend against antibiotic-resistant diseases or bioterrorism? What would the response to a biological attack or disease pandemic look like? Those threats and the collaboration of private, federal and local agencies to respond to them were the focus of a hearing Wednesday in the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security on biodefense preparedness. Congressman Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., said at the beginning of the hearing that around 2.4 million people could die in high-income countries between 2015 and 2050 without an effort to contain antimicrobial resistance, according to an April report to the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

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Blue Button Developers to Meet at the White House Today - Verma and Liddell to Open the Conference

More than 700 app developers and eHealth groups and organizations have registed to meet today at the White House for the first Blue Button 2.0 developer conference. The "The inaugural Blue Button 2.0 Developer Conference will bring together application developers in the technical community to help build and develop new tools to help patients understand their health data,” said Seema Verma, Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in a statement. 

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