public health

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CDC's Virtual Events Program Created By The Public Sector, For The Public Sector

Brittany Ballenstedt | Nextgov | February 7, 2014

Declines in budgets across the public health community were just one reason the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began looking at innovative approaches for employees and partners to collaborate online. Read More »

CDC: Foodborne Illness In The U.S. Not Getting Better

Maryn McKenna | Wired | April 17, 2014

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention today released their annual survey of foodborne illnesses in the United States, and the news is, well, not great. In the words of the press announcement they sent out to announce the data release: “limited progress.” Read More »

CDC: Some Hospitals Need Assistance Using Antibiotics Properly (And The New Federal Budget May Help)

Maryn McKenna | Wired | March 4, 2014

[...] In an analysis of several sets of hospital data, gathered by the agency and also purchased from independent databases, the CDC said it found that more than 37 percent of prescriptions written in hospitals involved some sort of error or poor practice, increasing the risk of serious infections or antibiotic resistance. Read More »

CDISC and TransCelerate Announce New Standard for Breast Cancer to Support Data Sharing for Oncology Research

Press Release | CDISC, TransCelerate BioPharma, Inc. | May 18, 2016

The need to rapidly and efficiently share new data in cancer research was recently, and powerfully, highlighted by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden as part of the Cancer Moonshot initiative. The Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) and TransCelerate BioPharma, Inc. (“TransCelerate”) announce today the open availability of a new CDISC Therapeutic Area (TA) Standard for Breast Cancer. The CDISC global TA standards can streamline the way clinical research is conducted so that data can be readily shared among clinicians, researchers and regulators around the world, thus leading to more rapid and “smarter” research...

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Censorship Doesn’t Just Stifle Speech — It Can Spread Disease

Maryn Mckenna | Wired | August 21, 2013

In October, Saudi Arabia will host millions of travelers on the hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Islam’s holy sites. The hajj carries deep meaning for those observant Muslims who undertake it, but it also carries risks that make epidemiologists blanch. [...] Read More »

Charity Alliance Launches Fund To Make Charitably Funded Research Open Access

Press Release | Charity Open Access Fund | September 3, 2014

An alliance of leading UK medical research charities is today launching a new fund to help make charitably funded research freely available as soon as it is published.  Arthritis Research UK, Breast Cancer Campaign, the British Heart Foundation (BHF), Cancer Research UK, Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research, and the Wellcome Trust have joined together to create the Charity Open Access Fund (COAF)...

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Chikungunya Has Sickened More Than 10,000 In Puerto Rico

Liz Szabo and Karen Weintraub | USA Today | December 4, 2014

It's an unfamiliar tropical virus with an exotic name that causes painful symptoms and has no known treatment or vaccine. It's spreading in the USA...

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Childbirth Death Is Way More Likely In The US Than The UK, And It’s Getting Worse

Rachel Feltman | Quartz | May 2, 2014

The US is one of only eight countries to see an increase in childbirth-related deaths since 2003, according to a study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. While maternal mortality has dropped by 3.1% in developed countries (and 1.3% globally) since 1990, it increased by 1.7% in the US during the same time period...

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Clinical Decision Support Strategies for Electronic Case Reporting and its Open Source Connection

A key element of public health surveillance is the reporting of infectious and certain non-infectious conditions to state, local, and tribal public health agencies (PHA) around the United States. Historically, there have been a number of key challenges with the process of case reporting that is pervasive in the United States today. To help overcome some of these barriers, an effort has been underway to move the process of case reporting to electronic. A key component of the emerging electronic care reporting (eCR) strategy is the use of clinical decision support (CDS) to help clinical care organizations determine if a reportable condition is present in a patient's record. Multiple approaches have been identified for this CDS service, including a centralized model being implemented today, and several distributed options which will likely become equally viable. Given the size, diversity, and decentralized nature of healthcare enterprises, it is likely that all three approaches for CDS discussed in this article will be deployed simultaneously.

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Cloudera Becomes Founding Member of Lockheed Martin Healthcare Technology Alliance

Press Release | Cloudera | August 3, 2015

Cloudera, the leader in enterprise analytic data management powered by Apache Hadoop™, today announced it has joined a new healthcare technology alliance formed by Lockheed Martin. This alliance seeks to combine the expertise of leading health IT providers, medical technology companies, and academic institutions to advance public health.The members of the Lockheed Martin Healthcare Technology Alliance will collaborate on technology solutions that help improve care in rapidly evolving and growing areas of health technology, such as those that...

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CMS Promoting Interoperability in 2021: All good things must come to an end?

We have spent years involved with the management of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Electronic Health Records (EHR) Incentive Programs which were created by the HITECH Act (2009). These programs were recently renamed Promoting Interoperability (PI) programs. In a nutshell, these programs were tied to the Medicare and Medicaid insurance programs and provided financial incentives over a number of years to ambulatory providers and hospitals to adopt and use EHRs. Vendors submitted their technology products for testing and certification that they performed specific functions and could exchange data using specified message formats...But the provisions of the HITECH Act are due to expire on September 30, 2021 (see CMS timeline). These are the programs affected...

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CMS Promoting Interoperability Program: A Public Health Perspective

Well, here we go again. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has now released a new Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), titled Medicare Program; Revisions to Payment Policies under the Physician Fee Schedule and Other Revisions to Part B for CY 2019; Medicare Shared Savings Program Requirements; Quality Payment Program; and Medicaid Promoting Interoperability Program...As this NPRM was released, the CMS Administrator, Seema Verma, published an open letter to doctors which is focused on reducing the burden on doctors so they can spend more time with physicians. HL7 has begun a similar initiative on reducing clinical burden. So the key question is: Does this NPRM go far enough to reduce provider burden in the spirit of Dr. Verma's letter?

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CMS Releases Proposed Updates to Medicare MIPS Promoting Interoperability Program for Physicians

On July 29, 2022 the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) related to changes in the Medicare Program Physician Fee Schedule for 2013. Among the proposals in this lengthy document are those related to the Promoting Interoperability Program for physician practices, the successor to the Meaningful Use of Electronic Health Record (EHR) technology that was originally rooted in the 2009 HITECH Act. This program has been evolving over the years and this NPRM proposes some meaningful changes to the public health reporting component which would first be used for calendar year 2023.

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Commentary: Meaningful Use of Health Information Exchange?

Dr. John Loonsk | Government Health IT | October 3, 2011

The title of this article is pure jargon, but does express the issue at hand. An alternative title “The Most Important Health Policy Decision Hidden as an Obscure Health IT Technical Evaluation that You May Never Have Heard of,” would have also been accurate, but is grammatically unsound and too flippant for an important subject. Read More »

CommonWell Members to Build Healthcare APIs to Expand Service

Kate Monica | EHR Intelligence | February 15, 2017

CommonWell Health Alliance is set to expand as its existing services with agreements from 14 new members committed to building new healthcare application programming interfaces (APIs) for the health data exchange platform. “Although there is still much to be done before achieving the ‘ubiquitous interoperability’ CommonWell Members seek, the collective pursuit of that mission by our Members has created a unique culture of collaboration,” said Executive Director Jitin Asnaani...

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