emergency preparedness
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7 iPhone Apps That Will Help You Survive Hurricane Sandy
Even though the iPhone does a lot of magical fun things, you can also use it to stay informed on Sandy and use a couple of apps that will help you know what to do when disaster hits. We want everyone on the East Coast to stay as safe as possible today so here are seven apps that will help you survive Sandy.
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At CES, Humetrix Shows its e-Prescribed Digital Health Technology to Transform Healthcare in the Hands of Consumers
At CES, Humetrix will demo its suite of mobile health platforms that put consumers around the world in control of their own care. By offering actionable mobile applications that address the complexity of medical care, delivered in multiple settings, and which needs to be personalized, Humetrix places decision-making tools in consumers’ own hands and on their own devices, where they can use it.
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California's Blackouts Reveal Health Care's Fragile Power System
The United States health care system depends on electricity to function normally: it needs power to run everything from ventilators to electronic health records, to ferry patients via elevator through hospitals, refrigerate medications, and countless other tasks. But that PG&E planned outage wasn't the last. There were more outages last week, and they are likely to become more frequent as the changing climate keeps California dry and makes fires more likely. The number of weather-related power outages is also increasing as extreme weather events become more common. As a result, it's more critical than ever that health care facilities are prepared for a present and future where power isn't a guarantee. Read More »
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Confronting Catastrophic Disasters With 21St Century Technologies
The unfolding tragedy in the Bahamas demonstrates that the 21st century will be marked by increasingly frequent, often catastrophic disasters of unprecedented scope and scale. Yet again, the unprecedented challenges of disaster management are being met with mostly conventional, labor-intensive, costly, and often inadequately slow response efforts. These 21st-century threats, particularly those that affect livelihood, health, and well-being, deserve the application of 21st-century technologies. Read More »
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COVID-19 Will Be The Ultimate Stress Test For Electronic Health Record Systems
As the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19 continues its march around the world and through the United States, it is spawning another kind of infection: Covid-19 cyber threats aimed at individuals and health systems. We aren't crying wolf here. Disaster planning experts know all too well that preexisting weaknesses become worse during crises. The WannaCry cyber attack that devastated the United Kingdom's National Health Service is a good example. Outdated infrastructure containing components with long-understood vulnerabilities are a hacker's paradise...The undeniable fact that electronic health record systems are designed to track and bill procedures rather than provide optimal patient care is likely to be on full display as the health system becomes increasingly saturated with Covid-19 patients.
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Diagnostic Errors Top ECRI Institute’s Patient Safety Concerns for 2018
ECRI Institute names diagnostic errors the number one concern on its 2018 Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for Healthcare Organizations. Each year, approximately 1 in 20 adults experiences a diagnostic error, according to published studies. These errors and delays can lead to care gaps, repeat testing, unnecessary procedures, and patient harm. “Diagnostic errors are not only common, but they can have serious consequences," says Gail M. Horvath, MSN, RN, CNOR, CRCST, patient safety analyst, ECRI Institute. "A lot of hospital deaths that were attributed to the normal course of disease may have been the result of diagnostic error."
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Ebola Cases Put Focus On Health IT Needs
The Ebola cases in the United States, despite their limited numbers, have generated considerable discussion and anxiety. The discussion has included health IT because of the initial assertion that the Dallas hospital electronic health record led to the first U.S. Ebola case being sent home...
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Ebola In West Africa Is A Wake-Up Call
Eight months into the world's worst Ebola outbreak, we have lost 5,000 lives and expect to see more infections and deaths in the coming months. The reason is simple: We have no drug to cure Ebola, or vaccine to prevent it...
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Government of St. Maarten Launches Program to Train Students in Emergency Preparedness and Response Skills
The Government of Sint Maarten is pleased to announce the launch of the Youth Emergency Hero (YEH) program that teaches school students how to prepare themselves, their households and their communities for emergencies and stay safe during disasters. The curriculum is provided by University instructors at the Caribbean Center for Disaster Medicine at the American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine on St. Maarten.
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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.
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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
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Humetrix Demonstrates DIRECT and Mobile Enabled Provider-to-Patient EHR Exchange for Interoperability with the Cerner EHR at Health 2.0 Fall Conference
At the Health 2.0 Fall Conference Humetrix will demo its suite of apps; iBlueButton, SOS QR, and Tensio at booth #308. On October 3, Humetrix and Cerner will participate in a session entitled “Breaking Down the Silos” taking place at 11:20 a.m. During the session, Humetrix will demo the award-winning mobile health platform, iBlueButton, which enables patients to immediately receive, at any point of care, their summary health record from any federally certified EHR system using the DIRECT secure messaging protocol.
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Humetrix to Demo its Award-Winning SOS QR Emergency & Disaster Preparedness Mobile Platform at FCC Accessibility Innovations Expo
Humetrix, developer of the award-winning SOS QR emergency mobile platform, last year’s recipient of the FCC Chairman’s Awards for Advancements in Accessibility (AAA), is honored to participate in this year’s FCC Accessibility Innovation Expo taking place on October 23 in Washington, DC.
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Is Roz Diane Lasker, MD on Your Radar Screen?
This resource-rich post comes from NCDD member Max Hardy, Director of Twyfords — a prominent consultancy that works throughout Australia and New Zealand. Max is co-author of the just-published book The Power of Co: The Smart Leaders’ Guide to Collaborative Governance. Is Roz on your radar screen? Read More »
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New Report Finds Nation's Public Health Emergencies Are Increasing While State Emergency Preparedness Levels face Challenges
The report takes an annual snapshot of states' public health and emergency readiness. Authored by TFAH since 2003, it...highlights pressing needs for additional action particularly as weather- related and other public health emergencies become more frequent...It identifies specific action-steps that if taken would improve the jurisdiction's overall level of emergency preparedness, including dedicated funding for health security initiatives, modernizing and supporting technologies and innovations within public health programs, and building multisectoral collaboration and leadership.
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