News Clips
“The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call” Takes Aim at Roots of Century’s Greatest U.S. Healthcare Crisis
The widespread overprescription and abuse of opioids has become the most visible symbol of the failures of the U.S. healthcare system. Now a new book by Dave Chase, founder of Health Rosetta, provides the first comprehensive prescription for fixing that entire broken system. The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call: Health Care Stole the American Dream. Here’s How We Take It Back is a rallying cry for nationwide systems change, spearheaded at the local level. “The opioid epidemic is affecting millions of families, thousands of employers, and nearly every community,” said Chase. “It’s a problem that demands our attention and focus, and which we can only truly fix by attacking the upstream cause of the entire mess: the continued dysfunction of the U.S. healthcare system.”
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FEMA Was Overwhelmed by Hurricanes and Wildfires in 2017, GAO Says
The back-to-back devastation of hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, followed by catastrophic wildfires in California, overwhelmed federal disaster responders in 2017, according to a government report released Tuesday. The unprecedented sequence of storms and fires forced Federal Emergency Management Agency staff to jump from one disaster to another and in some cases use uncertified workers to fill key roles. “They were 30% understaffed when Harvey hit,” said Chris Currie, director of emergency management issues at the Government Accountability Office, which wrote Tuesday’s report. “By the time Maria hit Puerto Rico, they were down to the bottom of the barrel.”
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GWU Milken Institute School of Public Health releases report on deaths due to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and outlines steps to protect the most vulnerable communities from disasters
In an independent report published today, researchers at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health (GW Milken Institute SPH) estimated there were 2,975 excess deaths in Puerto Rico due to Hurricane Maria from September 2017 through the end of February 2018. The researchers also identified gaps in the death certification and public communication processes and went on to make recommendations that will help prepare Puerto Rico for future hurricanes and other natural disasters.
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Plan VI - OSEHRA Launching Internationalized Version of VistA
OSEHRA is pleased to announce the launch of a new initiative to create an internationalized version of the VistA Electronic Health Record (EHR) system. Originally developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, VistA is periodically released to the public via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and enhanced by the OSEHRA community to create OSEHRA VistA, an open source resource for the entire EHR community. The internationalization effort, dubbed Plan VI, aims to expand VistA capability by making it compatible with various different languages and creating a reference implementation for global use.
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Rush Medical Center Demoes Patient-Centered Blue Button 2.0 Mobile App at White House Event
Information technology has changed the world, and now it’s changing health care in dramatic and fast-moving ways. Rush is a nationally-recognized leader in using IT to achieve better outcomes, lower costs and improve the patient experience. This leadership reached the White House on Monday, when...Rab and Boutrs presented MyRush Mobile, an app for mobile phones developed by Rush’s information systems department, to representatives of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, including CMS director Seema Verma. The presentation was part of the Blue Button 2.0 Conference, a gathering of software developers held in the White House South Court Auditorium.
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Microsoft, Amazon, Google, IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce Issue Joint Statement Making Commitment to Open Source Healthcare Interoperability
Interoperability is an overlapping set of technical and policy challenges, from data access to common data models to information exchange to workflow integration – and these challenges often pose a barrier to healthcare innovation. Microsoft has been engaged for many years on developing best practices for interoperability across industries. Today, as health IT community leaders get together at the CMS Blue Button 2.0 Developer Conference here in Washington, DC, we’re pleased to announce that Microsoft has joined with Amazon, Google, IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce in support of healthcare interoperability...
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Tech Industry Pledges to Improve Healthcare Through Open Source Health IT
Today, ITI President and CEO Dean Garfield and several ITI member companies participated in the Blue Button 2.0 Developer Conference at the White House where they announced their commitment to removing barriers for the adoption of technologies for healthcare interoperability, particularly those that are enabled through the cloud and AI...“Today’s announcement will be a catalyst to creating better health outcomes for patients at a lower cost,” said ITI president and CEO Dean Garfield. “As transformative technologies like cloud computing and artificial intelligence continue to advance, it is important that we work towards creating partnerships that embrace open standards and interoperability.
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Major Upgrade to Innovative Open Source Immunization Forecaster Released
Innovative open source software, originally developed for public health, is freely available to EHR and PHR systems to support clinical decision support for immunizations...ICE is a state-of-the-art open-source software system that provides clinical decision support for immunizations for use in Immunization Information Systems (IIS), Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Personal Health Record (PHR) Systems...HLN will be presenting this new version this week at the annual meeting of the American Immunization Registry Association (AIRA) and week of August 20 at the CDC Public Health Informatics Conference Read More »
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Wagner Foundation Donates $15 Million to Partners In Health for Hi Tech Healthcare Projects
The Wagner Foundation, a private Boston-based foundation, announced today that it is supporting international medical charity Partners In Health with a $15 million grant. The award represents the largest donation to any entity in the Wagner Foundation’s 13-year history, and will enable Partners In Health to launch a groundbreaking initiative to improve the health of impoverished people, especially women and children, in 10 countries around the world....By supporting data infrastructure and expertise, Partners In Health and the Wagner Foundation are also eager to show that long-term investments in public healthcare systems, not just disaster or emergency responses, produce the best outcomes for patients, families, and communities.
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OSEHRA 2018 Leadership Award Recipients Recognized
OSEHRA recently announced this year’s 2018 Leadership Award recipients during our 7th Annual Open Source Summit. The OSEHRA community chose to honor four distinguished individuals based on their outstanding achievements in health information technology and contributions to innovative health care. Awardees were selected via a community nomination and election process. We would like to extend a thank you to the 2018 Awards Committee for its due diligence and commitment to the community. The Committee was co-chaired by Dr. Jack Taylor of InforMD, Inc. and Keith McCall of KRM Associates, Inc.
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DSS and HLN Consulting Partner to Offer Enhanced Immunization Forecasting Solution
Document Storage Systems, Inc. (DSS), a leading provider of health information technology (HIT) solutions for federal, private and public healthcare organizations, announced that it has partnered with HLN Consulting to offer an enhanced forecasting solution that provides clinical decision support (CDS) for immunizations. HLN Consulting’s open source Immunization Calculation Engine (ICE) is now interfaced with the DSS Immunization Dashboard (iDB), to bring patient-specific immunization forecasting to the provider without an interface to a registry. iDB provides a visualization of the patient’s historical record from the treating facility, as well as information from the Immunization Registry.
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OSEHRA 2018 - Most Diverse Open Source EHR Summit to Date
This year's three-day OSEHRA Open Source Summit promises to be the most diverse ever, highlighting open source initiatives across a dozen Federal and State agencies, and showcasing industry progress in key areas such as emerging hybrid proprietary/open source interoperability solutions and synthetic patient data generation...This year's agenda includes a combination of engaging track sessions, town-hall discussion, and plenary events. The content will be exceptionally diverse, including: An interoperability platform demonstration drawing healthcare data from multiple health record systems; A demonstration of synthetic patient data generation, including the first public demonstration of tailored synthetic data being loaded into the open source VistA Electronic Health Record (EHR) via a new open source data loader...
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CCHF Unveils Book Warning of "the Dangers of Electronic Health Records" at the FreedomFest 2018 Conference
A new, groundbreaking book from Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom (CCHF) will expose how the mandated, government-certified EHR technology (CEHRT) has negatively affected both doctors and patients. Written by CCHF president and co-founder Twila Brase, RN, PHN, and published by Beaver’s Pond Press...Brase’s extensively researched work shows how and why Congress forced doctors and hospitals to install a data-collecting, command and control surveillance system in the exam room. It also includes the impact of EHRs on privacy, patient care, costs, patient safety and more, according to doctors and more than 125 studies....This week, Brase is unveiling “Big Brother in the Exam Room” at FreedomFest 2018 at the Paris Resort Las Vegas. Brase will be a part of several panels and will introduce the book to fellow freedom-loving patriots who recognize that rights also extend to health care...
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The U.S. Air Force learned to code—and saved the Pentagon millions
The notable thing about the decision to start working on low-level code—and about all of the team’s decisions—is that it was made on the fly, based on real-time conversations about users’ needs. That’s nothing more than best practices for modern software development, but at the DoD, such agility would normally be impossible. Specifications commonly take years to write and then more years to deliver on before code can even be tested in the field—often making systems obsolete by the time they’re delivered. “The DoD violates pretty much every rule in modern product development,” Schmidt told U.S. Congress recently.
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How disparate EHR systems, lack of interoperability contribute to physician stress, burnout
Physician burnout is an increasingly common issue in healthcare, and there are a lot of factors that can contribute to it. Long hours, paperwork and the burden of administrative tasks all play a part. But electronic medical records can also contribute to burnout, largely because each system is different. With disparate electronic health record systems comes an added hardship for physicians, affecting their work -- and their reimbursement. Compounding the issue is that many physicians are no longer limited to just one facility. Many handle rounds at multiple hospitals and/or practices, and if each has its own EMR system that doesn't necessarily communicate with the others, it can be a growing headache.
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