News Clips
HHS Deputy Secretary Hargan Announces Collaboration to Accelerate Innovation and Investment in Healthcare
Today, Health and Human Services Deputy Secretary Eric Hargan announced the creation of the Deputy Secretary's Innovation and Investment Summit (DSIIS). The DSIIS will be a yearlong collaboration between healthcare innovation and investment professionals and HHS personnel who will meet quarterly to discuss the innovation and investment landscape within the healthcare sector, emerging opportunities, and the government's role in facilitating more investment and accelerated innovation.
Bipartisan Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense Applauds Release of National Biodefense Strategy as a Crucial Step in Protecting the U.S. From Biological Attacks
The bipartisan Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense today applauded the Trump Administration for developing and releasing a National Biodefense Strategy to better defend the U.S. against myriad biological threats. The development and implementation of a comprehensive national biodefense strategy was among the top recommendations of the Panel's 2015 report: A National Blueprint for Biodefense...Governor Tom Ridge, Panel Co-Chair, [said] "Today's release of the National Biodefense Strategy is an important and necessary part of U.S. national security...We look forward to the White House assigning responsibilities for each element of this Plan to specific federal departments and agencies, and establishing timelines for their completion. This is the sort of proactive planning and preparation the American people are looking for in their federal government." Read More »
What Puerto Rico’s Death Toll from Hurricane Maria Really Tells Us
The recently released report from the Milken Institute is perhaps the strongest rebuke to date on the impact of Hurricane Maria during the 2017 hurricane season. The report notes nearly 3,000 people have died in Puerto Rico because of the storm. These numbers provide a more accurate depiction of the devastation and lives lost in Puerto Rico. While sad and troubling, it is important to call out that these updated numbers do not even account for the death toll in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
José Andrés’s riveting ‘We Fed an Island’ calls for a revolution in disaster relief
After dealing with so much red tape and mismanagement... Andrés wants the government and nonprofit groups to rethink the way they handle food after a large-scale natural disaster. He wants them to drop the authoritarian, top-down style and embrace the chaos inherent in crisis. Work with available local resources, whether residents or idle restaurants and schools. Give people the authority and the means to help themselves. Stimulate the local economy.“What we did was embrace complexity every single second,” Andrés writes. “Not planning, not meeting, just improvising. The old school wants you to plan, but we needed to feed the people.” Andrés and World Central Kitchen have embraced complexity. An organization not originally designed as a food relief organization, WCK has, in the aftermath of Puerto Rico, sent chefs to Hawaii, Guatemala, Indonesia and other locales to feed locals in need.
“The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call” Takes Aim at Roots of Century’s Greatest U.S. Healthcare Crisis
The widespread overprescription and abuse of opioids has become the most visible symbol of the failures of the U.S. healthcare system. Now a new book by Dave Chase, founder of Health Rosetta, provides the first comprehensive prescription for fixing that entire broken system. The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call: Health Care Stole the American Dream. Here’s How We Take It Back is a rallying cry for nationwide systems change, spearheaded at the local level. “The opioid epidemic is affecting millions of families, thousands of employers, and nearly every community,” said Chase. “It’s a problem that demands our attention and focus, and which we can only truly fix by attacking the upstream cause of the entire mess: the continued dysfunction of the U.S. healthcare system.”
FEMA Was Overwhelmed by Hurricanes and Wildfires in 2017, GAO Says
The back-to-back devastation of hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, followed by catastrophic wildfires in California, overwhelmed federal disaster responders in 2017, according to a government report released Tuesday. The unprecedented sequence of storms and fires forced Federal Emergency Management Agency staff to jump from one disaster to another and in some cases use uncertified workers to fill key roles. “They were 30% understaffed when Harvey hit,” said Chris Currie, director of emergency management issues at the Government Accountability Office, which wrote Tuesday’s report. “By the time Maria hit Puerto Rico, they were down to the bottom of the barrel.”
GWU Milken Institute School of Public Health releases report on deaths due to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and outlines steps to protect the most vulnerable communities from disasters
In an independent report published today, researchers at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health (GW Milken Institute SPH) estimated there were 2,975 excess deaths in Puerto Rico due to Hurricane Maria from September 2017 through the end of February 2018. The researchers also identified gaps in the death certification and public communication processes and went on to make recommendations that will help prepare Puerto Rico for future hurricanes and other natural disasters.
Plan VI - OSEHRA Launching Internationalized Version of VistA
OSEHRA is pleased to announce the launch of a new initiative to create an internationalized version of the VistA Electronic Health Record (EHR) system. Originally developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, VistA is periodically released to the public via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and enhanced by the OSEHRA community to create OSEHRA VistA, an open source resource for the entire EHR community. The internationalization effort, dubbed Plan VI, aims to expand VistA capability by making it compatible with various different languages and creating a reference implementation for global use.
Rush Medical Center Demoes Patient-Centered Blue Button 2.0 Mobile App at White House Event
Information technology has changed the world, and now it’s changing health care in dramatic and fast-moving ways. Rush is a nationally-recognized leader in using IT to achieve better outcomes, lower costs and improve the patient experience. This leadership reached the White House on Monday, when...Rab and Boutrs presented MyRush Mobile, an app for mobile phones developed by Rush’s information systems department, to representatives of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, including CMS director Seema Verma. The presentation was part of the Blue Button 2.0 Conference, a gathering of software developers held in the White House South Court Auditorium.
Microsoft, Amazon, Google, IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce Issue Joint Statement Making Commitment to Open Source Healthcare Interoperability
Interoperability is an overlapping set of technical and policy challenges, from data access to common data models to information exchange to workflow integration – and these challenges often pose a barrier to healthcare innovation. Microsoft has been engaged for many years on developing best practices for interoperability across industries. Today, as health IT community leaders get together at the CMS Blue Button 2.0 Developer Conference here in Washington, DC, we’re pleased to announce that Microsoft has joined with Amazon, Google, IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce in support of healthcare interoperability...
Tech Industry Pledges to Improve Healthcare Through Open Source Health IT
Today, ITI President and CEO Dean Garfield and several ITI member companies participated in the Blue Button 2.0 Developer Conference at the White House where they announced their commitment to removing barriers for the adoption of technologies for healthcare interoperability, particularly those that are enabled through the cloud and AI...“Today’s announcement will be a catalyst to creating better health outcomes for patients at a lower cost,” said ITI president and CEO Dean Garfield. “As transformative technologies like cloud computing and artificial intelligence continue to advance, it is important that we work towards creating partnerships that embrace open standards and interoperability.
Major Upgrade to Innovative Open Source Immunization Forecaster Released
Innovative open source software, originally developed for public health, is freely available to EHR and PHR systems to support clinical decision support for immunizations...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...HLN will be presenting this new version this week at the annual meeting of the American Immunization Registry Association (AIRA) and week of August 20 at the CDC Public Health Informatics Conference Read More »
Wagner Foundation Donates $15 Million to Partners In Health for Hi Tech Healthcare Projects
The Wagner Foundation, a private Boston-based foundation, announced today that it is supporting international medical charity Partners In Health with a $15 million grant. The award represents the largest donation to any entity in the Wagner Foundation’s 13-year history, and will enable Partners In Health to launch a groundbreaking initiative to improve the health of impoverished people, especially women and children, in 10 countries around the world....By supporting data infrastructure and expertise, Partners In Health and the Wagner Foundation are also eager to show that long-term investments in public healthcare systems, not just disaster or emergency responses, produce the best outcomes for patients, families, and communities.
2018 OSEHRA Leadership Award Recipients Recognized
OSEHRA recently announced this year’s 2018 Leadership Award recipients during our 7th Annual Open Source Summit. The OSEHRA community chose to honor four distinguished individuals based on their outstanding achievements in health information technology and contributions to innovative health care. Awardees were selected via a community nomination and election process. We would like to extend a thank you to the 2018 Awards Committee for its due diligence and commitment to the community. The Committee was co-chaired by Dr. Jack Taylor of InforMD, Inc. and Keith McCall of KRM Associates, Inc.
DSS and HLN Consulting Partner to Offer Enhanced Immunization Forecasting Solution
Document Storage Systems, Inc. (DSS), a leading provider of health information technology (HIT) solutions for federal, private and public healthcare organizations, announced that it has partnered with HLN Consulting to offer an enhanced forecasting solution that provides clinical decision support (CDS) for immunizations. HLN Consulting’s open source Immunization Calculation Engine (ICE) is now interfaced with the DSS Immunization Dashboard (iDB), to bring patient-specific immunization forecasting to the provider without an interface to a registry. iDB provides a visualization of the patient’s historical record from the treating facility, as well as information from the Immunization Registry.