Emergency Preparedness and Response (EPR)

See the following -

Americans Focus On Responding To Earthquake Damage, Not Preventing It, Because They Are Unaware Of Their Risk

On July 4 and 5, two major earthquakes, followed by several thousand smaller ones, struck Southern California. Their size and the damage they caused captured attention around the country. What tends to get much less notice from the public is what can be done to prevent catastrophic damage from big quakes. Had the epicenter of these latest large California earthquakes been closer to downtown Los Angeles, tens of thousands of apartment buildings could have been damaged or collapsed. Consequently, structural engineers are calling on legislators to prepare for and prevent earthquake damage by crafting new and improved building codes...

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apifocal

apifocal is a professional services company with a core focus on open source technology. Our consultants are developers or contributors to quite a few open source projects at the Apache Software Foundation, but not only. Our consultants bring you not only in-depth knowledge of how the technologies you depend on actually work but deployed and fine-tuned them in many production environments.

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AUC Medical School Students Hold Inaugural Disaster Preparedness and Response TEDx Event in St. Maarten

Press Release | American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine | October 17, 2019

Ten speakers captivated a soldout audience at AUC's first TEDx event last Sunday. TEDxAUCMED brought together students and members of the Sint Maarten community for a 7-hour program of powerful and inspiring talks...The event theme, Weathering the Storm, was carefully selected as an homage to Hurricane Irma. Conference organizers chose talks that applied the theme both literally and metaphorically. "This event centers not only on the science of weathering the storm but the notion that we are capable of overcoming extreme adversity," Elizabeth Allison said during her opening remarks. "We hope today empowers you to weather your own storms." While some speakers gave harrowing accounts from the category 5 hurricane, others talked about medicine, art, and evolving global landscapes. In his opening talk, 4th semester student Yassin Nayel used a powerful patient story to punctuate the question: how can we achieve equal treatment of infectious disease worldwide?

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Audacious Inquiry and The Sequoia Project Announce National Partnership to Support States in Disaster Response Through the Patient Unified Lookup System for Emergencies (PULSE)

Press Release | Audacious Inquiry, The Sequoia Project | October 31, 2019

Audacious Inquiry (Ai), an industry leader in connected care, and The Sequoia Project, Inc a non-profit dedicated to solving health IT interoperability for the public good, announced a teaming agreement to support the PULSE initiative and to leverage their combined expertise in support of displaced populations needing medical treatment and ongoing care as part of disaster response efforts. Ai first developed the PULSE concept under contract with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) in April 2014. In March 2016, the California Emergency Management Services Authority (CalEMSA) contracted with Ai to develop and operate PULSE. PULSE was subsequently activated for use during the California wildfires in October 2017, with the support of The Sequoia Project. The non-profit works to advance the breadth of PULSE by leveraging national networks and by convening a national advisory council of experts.

California's Blackouts Reveal Health Care's Fragile Power System

Nicole Wetsman | The Verge | October 28, 2019

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 »

California’s Other Drought: A Major Earthquake Is Overdue

California earthquakes are a geologic inevitability. The state straddles the North American and Pacific tectonic plates and is crisscrossed by the San Andreas and other active fault systems. Tragic quakes that occurred in 2017 near the Iran-Iraq border and in central Mexico, with magnitudes of 7.3 and 7.1, respectively, are well within the range of earthquake sizes that have a high likelihood of occurring in highly populated parts of California during the next few decades. The earthquake situation in California is actually more dire than people who aren't seismologists like myself may realize. Although many Californians can recount experiencing an earthquake, most have never personally experienced a strong one. For major events, with magnitudes of 7 or greater, California is actually in an earthquake drought. Multiple segments of the expansive San Andreas Fault system are now sufficiently stressed to produce large and damaging events.

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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 »

Confronting Catastrophic Disasters With 21St Century Technologies

Dan Hanfling, Tara O’Toole | The Hill | September 9, 2019

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 »

CORAnet Solutions, Inc.

CORAnetTM Solutions is a rapidly growing Global Healthcare IT company, providing innovative solutions to a more cost-effective personal health records management. We are a dedicated team of Healthcare and Health IT professionals with a shared vision to facilitate health empowerment. As the creators of the Mobile, Interoperable, Personal Health Information Exchange (PHIE) we are singularly focused on our mission to provide a best of breed Mobile, interoperable and secure EHR support solution and thus become the solution of choice for mobile users looking to own, control and access their medical records anytime, anywhere while enabling healthcare practitioners to provide coordinated care to their clients.

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CORAnet Solutions, Inc. Launches Certified PHR Applications for Allscripts

Press Release | CORAnet Solutions | April 28, 2015

CORAnet Solutions, Inc. announced it has received certification on several innovative applications via the Allscripts Developer Program (ADP) for users of Allscripts Professional EHR™, Allscripts TouchWorks® EHR and Allscripts Sunrise Acute Care™. The applications, CORAVault (ambulatory) and CORALink (emergency), are going to be featured in a webinar on April 30th. The webinar, which will start at 12:00 PM ET, can be joined here. CORAnet Solutions’ mobile application, CORAVault™, provides access to disparate electronic health records, CCD, CCR, and HL7 files securely from different locations such as hospitals, clinics, pharmacies and physician practices. The CORAnet server consolidates and organizes medical data  as a single personal health record (PHR) secured with 256-bit encryption to the patient’s smart phone, laptop and/or tablet where medical data are stored and accessible anytime, anywhere – both online and offline.

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CORAnet™ Takes Home the Frost & Sullivan Competitive Strategy Innovation and Leadership Award for its Outstanding Achievements in the Mobile EHR Market

Press Release | Frost & Sullivan | October 19, 2017

The 2017 North American Frost & Sullivan Award for Competitive Strategy Innovation and Leadership was conferred upon CORAnet™ Solutions, Inc. for its robust positioning in the mobile electronic health record (EHR) market. Perceiving the shift toward value-based care, CORAnet™ recognized early that there would be huge demand for mobile personal health record (PHR) solutions. It used this foresight to its advantage by not only delivering novel EHR solutions but also introducing an emergency medicine platform; an ambulatory platform that provides on-demand access to disparate, consolidated and organized PHRs; and a mobile telemedicine platform that offers remote access to care anywhere.

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Coronavirus Adds New Stress To Antiquated Health Record-Keeping

Darius Tahir | Politico | March 11, 2020

The U.S. health care system is on the leading edge of many technologies - except when it comes to passing information between doctors, laboratories, and public health officials. And that could add another snarl to the already troubled effort to test for coronavirus. Overreliance on faxing, phones and paper records is problem enough in ordinary times. Adding thousands of coronavirus tests a day will test the ability of providers, labs, and public health officials to keep track of all the results. Because not all results are automatically downloaded into physicians' records, the doctors may need to log into laboratory web portals or, if all else fails, turn to faxes and phones to learn test results.

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Corporate Resilience During A Pandemic

As humanity grapples with the spread of COVID-19 globally, the emotional response is to do something, anything, everything. But how do we take that energy and successfully adapt? Most prudent organizations have had on their radar more visible threats like hurricanes, earthquakes, power outages, terrorism, and war. The quiet pervasiveness of a pandemic seems to have caught us by surprise. But is adapting to a pandemic really that different? The good news is that proven principles still apply. Read More »

Covenant Park Integrated Initiatives, Inc.

Founded in 2007, Covenant Park builds large, integrated, complex programs for disaster preparedness and continuity. They provide their capabilities at the highest level of all three branches of the US government and for highly critical, global commercial operations. Covenant Park believes the complexity and interconnectedness of today's world requires an unprecedented level of coordination, analysis and communication to effectively identify and reduce risk. Read More »

COVID-19 Will Be The Ultimate Stress Test For Electronic Health Record Systems

Eric D. Perakslis and Erich Huang | STAT | March 12, 2020

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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