Harvard Medical School

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2019 International Conference on Disaster Medicine and Hurricane Resiliency Draws Hundreds

Press Release | American University of the Caribbean | March 20, 2019

More than 280 healthcare professionals, emergency preparedness experts, and government leaders gathered on campus March 8-11 with the goal of uniting their collective experience and expertise to increase their communities’ ability to manage hurricanes and other disasters. Attendees represented 12 countries, including 9 Caribbean islands, and a multitude of backgrounds in disaster preparedness and response, including disaster medicine and veterinary medicine, nursing, hospital administration, mental health, telehealth, EMS and first responders, disaster recovery and humanitarian assistance, medical education, and more.

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A Pocket-Sized Retina Camera, No Dilating Required

Press Release | University of Illinois at Chicago | March 20, 2017

It’s the part of the eye exam everyone hates: the pupil-dilating eye drops. The drops work by opening the pupil and preventing the iris from constricting in response to light and are often used for routine examination and photography of the back of the eye. The drops sting, can take up to 30 minutes to work, and cause blurry vision for several hours afterwards, often making them inconvenient for both patient and doctor. Now, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine and Massachusetts Eye and Ear/Harvard Medical School have developed a cheap, portable camera that can photograph the retina without the need for pupil-dilating eye drops...

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Antibiotic Resistance Doesn't Just Make Bacteria Harder To Kill – It Can Actually Make Them Stronger

Bacteria can become drug-resistant in two ways – resistance can be natural, meaning that the genes conferring resistance are already present in the bacterial chromosome, or they can be acquired through mutation or by picking up antibiotic-resistance genes from other microbes. It is now possible to use new DNA-sequencing technologies to take a closer look at how the antibiotic resistance can make some bacteria weaker or stronger. And in a new study, we found that – contrary to conventional wisdom around antibiotics – resistance can actually make some bacteria fitter and even more virulent.

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Apple Just Hired a Guy Who Could Completely Re-Invent the Company

Kif Leswing | Business Insider | June 23, 2016

Apple is quietly building one of the strongest teams in digital health, and on Thursday, it just added perhaps its most high-profile hire yet. Stephen Friend, co-founder and President of Sage Bionetworks, is joining Apple's healthcare team, Sage Bionetworks announced on Thursday. Apple said it had “nothing more to share about his role or title." Before Sage, Friend was an executive at Merck and a faculty member at Harvard Medical School...

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Are We Ready For Personalized Medicine For Behavioral Disorders?

Monica E. Oss | Open Minds | May 7, 2016

For most of the health care consuming public (meaning all of us), the era of personalized medicine can’t get here too soon. The thought of having the mass customization of Amazon applied to our health care – using our clinical, lifestyle, and genomics data to come up a “prescription” for wellness and treatment – is very appealing. What concerns me is the mindset that personalized medicine is applicable primarily to “physical” diseases – like cancer, cardiovascular disease, and autoimmune disorders...

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Beth Israel's CareKit App Leverages FHIR for Patient Engagement

The following is a guest blog post from Seth Berkowitz, MD, who authors many of the innovative apps in the BIDMC Crowdsourcing program: Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, has developed BIDMC@home, a new app for engaging patients using Apple’s CareKit and ResearchKit frameworks and the HealthKit API. The app provides a flexible framework to help patients manage their health from home, as directed by their physicians. The app will be piloted in several specific patient populations and will eventually be offered to BIDMC’s entire network of over 250,000 patients...

Can SMART on FHIR Solve mHealth’s Medication Management Challenges?

Staff Writer | mHealth Intelligence | January 18, 2017

An agreement to promote interoperability between three of the largest and most competitive EHR platforms has set the stage for a breakthrough in mHealth medication management. Using the SMART on FHIR app platform, providers will be able to access a patient’s entire medication history no matter where that data is stored. While this opens the door to better care management and coordination, it also gives patients the mHealth tools to manage their own care and collaborate with their doctors...

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Caribbean Center for Disaster Medicine to Host Second Annual Conference in Sint Maarten

Press Release | Caribbean Center for Disaster Medicine (CCDM), American University of the Caribbean (AUC) | October 22, 2019

Medical and disaster planning experts from around the globe are set to converge in Sint Maarten for the 2020 International Conference on Disaster Medicine and Hurricane Resiliency. The three-day conference, held March 26-29, 2020, is hosted by the Caribbean Center for Disaster Medicine (CCDM) at American University of the Caribbean (AUC) School of Medicine medical sciences campus in Sint Maarten. Organized by the CCDM, a collaboration between AUC and Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Inc., the event draws international disaster and healthcare stakeholders. This year's conference keynote speaker is Dr. Greg Ciottone, an American physician specializing in disaster medicine and counter-terrorism medicine. Read More »

Clinician, researcher, and patients working together: progress aired at Indivo conference

Andy Oram | O'Reilly Radar | June 21, 2012

I spent Monday in a small library at the Harvard Medical School listening to a discussion of the Indivo patient health record and related open source projects with about 80 intensely committed followers. Lead Indivo architect Daniel Haas, whom I interviewed a year ago, succeeded in getting the historical 2.0 release of Indivo out on the day of the conference. 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...

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Docs Vastly Outperform Computer Algorithms in Diagnostic Accuracy

Greg Slabodkin | Health Data Management | October 13, 2016

The maxim “doctors know best” is getting support from a new study led by Harvard Medical School researchers that shows physicians made a correct diagnosis more than twice as often as 23 commonly used symptom checkers—websites and apps that help patients with self-diagnosis. The study’s results, published October 10 in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, are being touted as the first direct comparison between human-made and computer-based diagnoses...

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Doctors Are Overloaded with Electronic Alerts, and That’s Bad for Patients

Shefali Luthra | The Washington Post | June 13, 2016

Some people receive constant reminders on their smartphones: birthdays, anniversaries, doctor’s appointments, social engagements. At work, their computers prompt them to meet deadlines, attend meetings and have lunch with the boss. Prodding here and pinging there, these pop-up interruptions can turn into noise to be ignored instead of helpful nudges. Something similar is happening to doctors, nurses and pharmacists. And when they’re hit with too much information, the result can be a health hazard...

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Electronic Health Records Increase Doctors’ Bureaucratic Burden

Press Release | Physicians for a National Health Program | October 23, 2014

The average U.S. doctor spends 16.6 percent of his or her working hours on non-patient-related paperwork, time that might otherwise be spent caring for patients. And the more time doctors spend on such bureaucratic tasks, the unhappier they are about having chosen medicine as a career.

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Epic and Other EHR Vendors Caught in Dilemmas by APIs (Part 1 of 2)

Andy Oram | EMR and HIPAA | March 15, 2017

The HITECH act of 2009 (part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) gave an unprecedented boost to an obscure corner of the IT industry that produced electronic health records. For the next eight years they were given the opportunity to bring health care into the 21st century and implement common-sense reforms in data sharing and analytics. They largely squandered this opportunity, amassing hundreds of millions of dollars while watching health care costs ascend into the stratosphere, and preening themselves over modest improvements in their poorly functioning systems...

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FHIR App Provides Precision Medicine Support at Point of Care

Jennifer Bresnick | Health IT Analytics | August 8, 2016

FHIR is helping to power a new precision medicine oncology app that brings clinical decision support to the point of care. Two of the most intriguing trends in healthcare may be able to work together to bring advanced clinical decision support directly to the point of care, suggest researchers who developed a FHIR-based precision medicine application that integrates with electronic health records...

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