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Puerto Rico’s Double Whammy: Irma and Hedge Funds

David Dayen | The American Prospect | September 8, 2017

Irma, the largest Atlantic hurricane in recorded history, has proven cruelly fickle as it surges through the Caribbean. The Category Five storm “hit like a bomb” on the small islands of Barbuda and St. Martin, destroying up to 95 percent of the structures and rendering the areas “barely habitable.” But Irma stayed north of Puerto Rico, sparing the island from the worst. That’s not to say that Puerto Rico didn’t sustain damage...

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Q&A: Why The U.S. Actually Needs Those Crazy ICD-10 Codes

Tom Sullivan | Government Health IT | July 23, 2013

For a bit of perspective on medical coding: ICD-9 was developed in the 1970’s — in the 70’s people could smoke in the hospital. Fast forward to 2012 and the raft of ICD-10 jokes began [...]. But lost amid the comedy, particularly on the national level, has been anyone publicly challenging those punchlines and explaining exactly why the U.S. as a nation really needs the new code sets. Read More »

Re-Examining The FDA Antibiotics Decision: Banning Growth Promoters Won’t Be Enough

Maryn McKenna | Wired | December 27, 2013

In my first take on the news of the FDA finalizing its request to agriculture to stop using growth-promoter antibiotics, I promised to come back for a more thoughtful reaction. And then this happened, and this happened, and the holidays happened, and, well, it’s been a busy few weeks. Read More »

Ready or Not: New Report on Protecting the Public's Health

By Noam H. Arzt, Ph.D. | May 5, 2019

The Trust for America's Health (TFAH) released its 2019 edition of what it hopes will be an annual report, Ready or Not: Protecting the Public's Health from Diseases, Disasters and Bioterrorism last February. The ground-breaking report warns about key global challenges ahead, like the risk of a flu pandemic; the impact of weather pattern changes due to climate change; the dangers of antimicrobial resistance, and others, and tries to offer advice on how to prepare for them.

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Red Hat Helps Public Health England Use Open Source to Pursue Hybrid Cloud Operations

Press Release | Red Hat | April 30, 2019

Red Hat, today announced that Public Health England (PHE), an executive agency of the Department of Health and Social Care in the United Kingdom, is using Red Hat's open hybrid cloud technologies to support modern digital public health services in the UK. To better support its scientific community, PHE sought to pursue an information and communication technology strategy that embraced modern computing architectures and solutions, including high-performance computing (HPC) and multicloud operations, and one built from an open, automation-centric ecosystem that could integrate a fragmented, proprietary set of existing systems.

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Report on the ONC 2017 Technical Interoperability Forum

By Noam H. Arzt, Ph.D. | August 21, 2017

Last week I attended with my colleague Mike Berry the ONC 2017 Technical Interoperability Forum. This meeting was convened under the 21st Century Cures Act passed by Congress in late 2016. Several hundred participants attended a series of panel presentations and discussions. The forum took place over one-and-a-half-days. The forum covered a variety of topics related to interoperability, including discussion of the business case for interoperability, semantics, national networks, and application programming interfaces (APIs). In many ways the speakers were “the usual suspects” involved in national networks, standards development, and HIE planning and implementation.

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Rethinking Fat: The Case For Adding Some Into Your Diet

Allison Aubrey | The Salt | March 31, 2014

Remember the fat-free boom that swept the country in the 1990s? Yes, we know from the Salt readers who took our informal survey that lots of you tried to follow it. And gave up. Read More »

Review Of Open Access In Economics

Ross Mounce | Open Knowledge Foundation | October 30, 2012

Ever since BioMed Central (BMC) published its first free online article on July 19th 2000, the Open Access movement has made significant progress, so much so that many different stakeholders now see 100% Open Access to research as inevitable in the near future. Read More »

RNRN Launches Fundraising Drive For Healthcare Workers In Ebola-Stricken Nations

Press Release | Registered Nurse Response Network | September 3, 2014

The Registered Nurse Response Network (RNRN), a project of National Nurses United (NNU), the nation’s largest professional organization of RNs, has initiated a national fundraising campaign to provide desperately needed personal protective equipment for frontline healthcare workers caring for patients stricken by the Ebola virus...

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Salmonella And The Shutdown: CDC Furloughs Harm Public Health

Michael Hiltzik | Los Angeles Times | October 10, 2013

Food expert Marion Nestle asks whether government-shutdown-mandated furloughs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hampered its response to the salmonella outbreak at Foster Farms. Read More »

Scenarios for Health Care Reform (Part 1 of 2)

Andy Oram | EMR and HIPAA | May 16, 2017

All reformers in health care know what the field needs to do; I laid out four years ago the consensus about patient-supplied data, widespread analytics, mHealth, and transparency. Our frustration comes in when trying to crack the current hide-bound system open and create change. Recent interventions by US Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act, whatever their effects on costs and insurance coverage, offer no promise to affect workflows or treatment. So this article suggests three potential scenarios where reform could succeed, along with a vision of what will happen if none of them take hold...

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Scenarios for Health Care Reform (Part 2 of 2)

Andy Oram | EMR and HIPAA | May 18, 2017

Some health care providers balk at the requirement to share data, but their legal and marketing teams explain that they have been doing it for years already with companies whose motives are less commendable. Increasingly, the providers are won over. The analytics service appeals particularly to small, rural, and safety-net providers. Hammered by payment cuts and growing needs among their populations, they are on the edge of going out of business and grasp the service as their last chance to stay in the black...

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Science, Society And Risk In The Anthropocene

Nutan Maurya | Economic & Political Weekly | October 11, 2014

The culture of too much hygiene in rapid, unplanned urbanising society with poor infrastructure exposes urban spaces to a particular risk brought about by unchecked use of technology. This article looks at the indiscriminate use of antibiotics and antibacterial consumer products, which form the aetiology for the emergence of new strains of antibiotic resistant bacteria (superbugs) in urban space, especially in waterbodies...

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Scientist at Work: Measuring Public Health Impacts after a Disaster

By Jennifer Horney | November 9, 2017

More than two months after Hurricane Harvey submerged much of metropolitan Houston, recovery is under way across the city. Residents and volunteers are gutting and restoring flooded homes. Government agencies and nonprofit organizations are announcing cleanup programs and developing plans to distribute relief funds. But many questions remain about impacts on public health. What contaminants did floodwaters leave behind? How many people are being exposed to mold – which can grow rapidly in damp, humid conditions – as they repair their homes? Will there be an increase in Zika, West Nile or other vector-borne diseases as mosquito populations recover? Or an uptick in reported cases of other illnesses?...

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Searching Upstream For The Source of Sickness

Beverly Merz | The Atlantic | January 15, 2014

New “upstreamist” doctors are looking for the roots of illness in patients’ environmental and social spheres. Read More »