Ebola
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Google Builds a New Tablet for the Fight Against Ebola
Jay Achar was treating Ebola patients at a makeshift hospital in Sierra Leone, and he needed more time. This was in September, near the height of the West African Ebola epidemic. Achar was part of a team that traveled to Sierra Leone under the aegis of a European organization called Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders. In a city called Magburaka, MSF had erected a treatment center that kept patients carefully quarantined, and inside the facility’s high-risk zone, doctors like Achar wore the usual polythene “moon suits,” gloves, face masks, and goggles to protect themselves from infection...
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Grant Supports Development Of Software To Judge Quality Of Electronic Public Health Data
With the growing need for early identification of emerging threats including those of bioterrorism, pandemic flu, Ebola and foodborne illnesses, public health departments nationwide are increasingly relying upon data captured from electronic sources. A $381,000, 2-year grant from the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health supports development by the Regenstrief Institute and the Indiana University Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health of open source software tools to measure and monitor the quality of electronic data being transmitted to public health departments across the nation from health care systems, medical laboratories, physician offices and other sources.
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Health IT 2014: Interoperability, Ebola And Healthcare.gov 2.0
Health IT in 2014 continued its path toward a system of interoperable and open data to improve patient care with IT systems...
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HealthMap Tracks Ebola’s Footprints Online, Preparing For The Next Big Outbreak
Since March, a group of data-savvy epidemiologists at Boston Children’s Hospital have watched Ebola slowly spread through West Africa, ominously lighting up their dials first as a trickle, then a torrent of mentions on social media and online news reports. The group, HealthMap, has been steadily ahead of the curve tracking this year’s outbreak. One day, they hope to be a step ahead of the next big disease...
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Here's How The Incoming USAID Tech Guru Plans To Fight Ebola
Ruggedized tablets, belt-worn printers and a high-tech alternative to the stiflingly hot protective gear health-care workers must wear when dealing with patients. Those are some of the technology tools the incoming chief innovation officer at the U.S. Agency for International Development says he plans to explore to combat the spread of the Ebola virus in West Africa...
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Here's Why Africa's Ebola Epidemic Is Officially 'Spiraling Out of Control'
Health authorities admitted Tuesday that the West African Ebola virus epidemic is accelerating quickly and may soon outpace the ability of medical teams to contain it. Meanwhile, the grim situation is being made worse by a massive strike among Liberian health care workers, who have accumulated large amounts of unpaid wages while suffering from overwork and the constant risk of exposure...
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Hospital CIOs: ONC Leadership Exodus Raises Questions About Federal HIT Priorities
Hospital CIOs expressed concern that the sudden announced departures of National Coordinator for Health IT Karen DeSalvo and Deputy National Coordinator Jacob Reider potentially leave federal health IT efforts in limbo...
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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...
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How A Free Mobile App Fights Ebola And Other Global Epidemics
The enormity and severity of the West African Ebola epidemic that began in 2014 is hard to fathom. The outbreak resulted in more than 11,000 deaths, and hundreds of thousands of people affected by loss. Providing adequate care for any medical condition depends on information, but even more so when dealing with an epidemic that is as severe, dangerous, and fast-moving as Ebola. This is the story of how a dispersed global health IT community banded together to solve the enormous, unique information challenges presented by Ebola...
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How NASA Launched Its Web Infrastructure Into The Cloud
Among U.S. government agencies, the adoption of cloud computing hasn’t been moving full steam ahead, to say the least. Even though 2011 saw the Obama administration unveil the cloud-first initiative that called for government agencies to update their old legacy IT systems to the cloud, it hasn’t been the case that these agencies have made great strides in modernizing their infrastructure...
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I'm A Hazmat-Trained Hospital Worker: Here's What No One Is Telling You About Ebola
Ebola is brilliant...All we can do is try to divert it, outrun it...
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IBM Launches Humanitarian Initiatives To Help Contain Ebola Outbreak In Africa
IBM has launched several initiatives to help curb the spread of Ebola in West Africa. They include a citizen engagement and analytics system in Sierra Leone that enables communities affected by Ebola to communicate their issues and concerns directly to the government; a donation of IBM Connections technology in Nigeria to strengthen the Lagos State government's preparedness for future disease outbreaks; and a global platform for sharing Ebola-related open data.
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Ingle: Officials Have Botched U.S. Response To Ebola
Because of the Ebola virus, mistrust of politicians and government agencies is growing, and they have nobody to blame but themselves. They blew it...
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Is the US Finally Ready to Get Serious About Biodefense?
Biological and other disaster threats - whether accidental, driven by forces of nature, or intentional - pose fairly grave risks to the United States and the world. Situational awareness has been a conspicuous topic ever since the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax scare that followed shortly thereafter. Since then we have experienced numerous disasters: health impacts of major weather events such as hurricanes and earthquakes, new virus outbreaks like Ebola in Africa, raging wildfires on the West Coast (I live in California), and the ever-present threat of pandemic flu which a hundred years ago infected some 500 million people across the globe and killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide, according to the Center for Disease Control and Preparedness (CDC). But since the initial flurry of public health preparedness funds in the ensuing several years after the 9/11 attacks, this topic has not had a high priority at CDC nor the funding necessary to implement it successfully.
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Is There Ebola On That Smartphone?
Medical staff treating patients with Ebola and other communicable diseases in Africa face a novel kind of smartphone security problem...
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