public health
See the following -
Hiding Our Heads in the Sand - Why the US is Unprepared for Pandemics and Disasters
A new report from the Trust for America's Health minces no words. President and CEO John Auerbach charges: COVID-19 has shined a harsh spotlight on the country's lack of preparedness for dealing with threats to Americans' well-being. Years of cutting funding for public health and emergency preparedness programs has left the nation with a smaller-than-necessary public health workforce, limited testing capacity, an insufficient national stockpile, and archaic disease tracking systems - in summary, twentieth-century tools for dealing with twenty-first-century challenges.
- Login to post comments
Highlighting The Best Open Access Research: BioMed Central’s 7th Annual Research Awards
It’s that time of year again! Nominations are open for you to put forward your favorite BioMed Central open access research article for our seventh annual Research Awards. Articles must be published in one of our 240 plus BioMed Central journals, during 2012 to qualify. Read More »
- Login to post comments
HIMSS14: Regulatory Showdown Looms Over Mobile Health
A legislative showdown is brewing between Congress and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration over the right balance between promoting innovation in a fledgling mobile health industry and protecting patient safety. 2014 could be the year that several laws are passed with significant implications for health I.T., according to a HIMSS14 panel discussion on congressional affairs. Read More »
- Login to post comments
HIMSS18: Key Exhibitor Booths for Open Solutions, Collaboration, and Interoperability
The annual gargantuan HIMSS conference is back at Las Vegas with over 40,000 participants, over a thousand exhibitors, and more than 600 presentations. As we saw last year in Orlando, more than half of the conference presentations are focused on applications based on open source such as FHIR and Blockchain, and a great emphasis on open solutions for interoperability. With so many presentations and exhibits, it is impossible to provide a full overview. Below are a few of some of the most interesting exhibits of open solutions this year.
- The Future Is Open
- Login to post comments
HIMSS19: Open Source Software for Disaster Preparedness and Response
Although not officially listed as a track at the HIMSS19 conference, there are a series of very important presentations on the use of open source software for disaster preparedness and response. This is a critical topic that we have covered extensively in Open Health News. As we detailed in this article, there was a major failure in being able to provide victims of Hurricane Harvey, as well as Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria with access to their medical records. Few emergency medical responders could access their records either. The two success stories that came out of the hurricanes were two open source electronic health record (EHR) systems, OpenEMR and the VA's open source VistA EHR.
- The Future Is Open
- Login to post comments
HIV History Suggests An Even More Paranoid Future For Ebola
HIV and the Ebola virus share some interesting and entirely sinister traits. One of those is extended incubation: Ebola can take up to three weeks to manifest as symptoms, while HIV can take years...
- Login to post comments
HLN Releases New Version of Award Winning Open Source Immunization Forecaster
HLN released a new version (v1.11.1) of the Immunization Calculation Engine (ICE) on March 9, 2018. ICE is a state-of-the-art open-source software system that provides clinical decision support (CDS) for immunizations for use in Immunization Information Systems (IIS), Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Personal Health Record (PHR) Systems. The release includes support for Earliest Date and Overdue Date for immunizations that are forecasted. If enabled, ICE will output two additional forecast dates along with the existing Recommendation Date...
- Login to post comments
HLN Releases Upgrade of Open Source Immunization Forecasting Tool
HLN Consulting has released a new version (v1.22.1) of the Immunization Calculation Engine (ICE). ICE is a state-of-the-art open-source software system that provides clinical decision support for immunizations for use in Immunization Information Systems (IIS), Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Personal Health Record (PHR) Systems. This version includes important updates including...
- Login to post comments
HLN Submits Comments to the CMS Quality Payment Program
On June 14, 2018 HLN submitted the following comments on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) 2019 Inpatient Prospective Payment System Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to Quality Payment Program based on our earlier comments...We are quite concerned by both the overall direction and the specific recommendations regarding public health objectives and measures in the NRPM. Regarding the changes to the proposed measures, CMS has not provided any explanation for why Syndromic Surveillance reporting was selected as the required measure. Other public health measures (e.g., Immunization reporting, Electronic Laboratory Reporting, Electronic Case Reporting) continue to require incentives for implementation.
- Login to post comments
HLN's Open Source Immunization Forecaster Receives 2017 Upshot Award
On June 6, 2017, HLN was awarded the 2017 Upshot Award for Excellence in Vaccine Supply, Access, and Use by the US Department of Health and Human Services National Vaccine Program Office (NVPO) for its ICE Open Source Immunization Forecaster. In the letter of award, Dr. Jewel Mullen, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health commented that, "HLN Consulting's efforts on the Immunization Calculation Engine (ICE) are impressive. This powerful tool-including its open-source nature and seamless integration into clinical workflows-holds great promise for improving clinical decision-support and ultimately vaccination rates. Thank you for daring to innovate, collaborate, and lead in an area that is not only complex, but constantly evolving."
- Login to post comments
Hospitals' Struggles To Beat Back Familiar Infections Before Ebola Arrived
While Ebola stokes public anxiety, more than one in six hospitals – including some top medical centers – are having trouble stamping out less exotic but sometimes deadly infections, federal records show...
- Login to post comments
How are Clinical Decision Support Artifacts Tested Today?
In October 2018 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a Request for Information (RFI) for a Natural Test Collaborative (NTC). Through a series of questions, the RFI seeks opinions and information about "The development of a national testbed (notionally called the National Test Collaborative (NTC)) for real-world testing of health information technology (IT)" and "Approaches for creating a sustainable infrastructure" to achieve it. The scope of this RFI is daunting. It might be useful, rather than to try to tackle this whole topic broadly but superficially, to take just one Clinical Decision Support (CDS) domain and show as completely as possible how testing is currently done.
- Login to post comments
How Congress Ignored Science and Fueled Antibiotic Resistance
The study was being conducted by Dr. Stuart B. Levy, a researcher in Boston. Levy was 36 in 1974. He was the son of a family doctor from Delaware and had grown up accompanying his father on house calls and discussing cases afterward. He was a faculty member at Tufts University School of Medicine, in a part of Boston that is gentrified now but was cheap and seedy then, and he had taken a circuitous route to get there, studying first literature, then medicine, and then microbiology in Italy and France...
- Login to post comments
How Healthy Are We?
Reliable data on health is an essential part of a comprehensive health information system, which is central to evidence-informed, responsive decision-making for better public health program. A well-functioning health information system also helps policy-makers and program managers to monitor population health and plan interventions accordingly. In line with the vision of a Digital Bangladesh, one of the more significant changes that have happened in our health sector is transforming paper-based health reporting into an electronic health information system, along with initiating a medical record system through the Open MRS software...
- Login to post comments
How High Tech Is Helping Bring Clean Water To India
Anand Shah runs a company that is using solar-powered “water ATMs” to bring clean water to remote villages in India. In an e360 interview, Shah talks about how his company is using a high-tech approach to address one of India’s most intractable public health issues. Read More »
- Login to post comments