News Clips

Cybersecurity—A Serious Patient Care Concern

Mark P. Jarrett | The JAMA Network | October 10, 2017

The world of paper medical records has almost disappeared, ushering in a new era of electronically stored, analyzed, and shared medical information that offers exciting opportunities for improved patient care. However, this major shift in information management has introduced unintended and unfavorable consequences, such as theft of patient-protected health information, wide-scale sequestering of medical records by ransomware (malicious software—malware—that permanently blocks the access to records unless a ransom is paid), and the ability for hackers to directly harm patients...

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The HITECH Era – A Patient-Centered Perspective

Robert M. Wachter, Michael Blum, Aaron Neinstein, and Mark Savage | Connecting Health Data | October 10, 2017

We appreciate the recent perspectives published in the New England Journal of Medicine on the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009 and the positive impact that it and resulting health IT policies have had on U.S. health care.1,2 The perspectives highlighted the remarkable increase in adoption and use of electronic health records (EHRs) over the past eight years, thanks to the HITECH Act and to ONC’s and CMS’s implementation of it with major advice and help from the multi-stakeholder HIT Policy and Standards committees...

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How the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Navigates the 'Supply Chain' of Open Source Software

David Needle | Enterprise.Nxt | October 9, 2017

Large companies have divisions and subsidiaries that make efficient organizational management a challenge. Perhaps no one recognizes that more than Colin Wynd, vice president and head of the Common Service Organization at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Wynd is charged with ensuring that software development practices and strategy are forward-thinking and secure, and adhere to compliance regulations. Several years ago, Wynd and his team started to think more holistically about how their developer teams worked, he explained in a presentation at the recent Jenkins World conference in San Francisco...

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Taking Stock: Interoperability and National Health IT Week

Jeff Smith | Medium | October 6, 2017

During a two-hour panel discussion hosted by ONC this week, yours truly provided views on the current state of interoperability. In celebration of National Health IT Week, panelists were asked to provide their thoughts on the biggest advancements made in interoperability, ways that government and industry should work together, and concerns about future challenges...

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VA's Hurricane Relief Efforts Extend Beyond Veterans

Johnathon Clinkscales | American Legion | October 5, 2017

The American Legion met with VA leadership on Sept. 29 to learn what humanitarian aid VA is, and has been, providing to hurricane victims in Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Florida and Texas..."There are 60 civilian hospitals in Puerto Rico, many of which are still inoperative, don't have power or have serious damage. There's only one hospital that is like the beacon in Puerto Rico and that is the VA medical center - seeing people, taking care of everybody we can and feeding everybody we can."..."We did a lot of preparing and started sending stuff down there before the hurricane. Now we're using these resources to take care of non-veterans and civilians until the hospitals - that are either damaged, incapable of operating or we don't know the condition of - come back into the system and then we'll transfer them. It is certainly necessary for a humanitarian effort like this," Loren said...

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PatientPoint and Shatterproof Launch National Point-of-Care Education Initiative to Fight Opioid Epidemic

Press Release | PatientPoint, Shatterproof | October 3, 2017

PatientPoint®, the trusted leader of patient and physician engagement solutions across all points of care, today announced a collaboration with national addiction prevention, treatment and recovery nonprofit Shatterproof to place opioid education in nearly 25,000 physician offices across the country. This program, the first national point-of-care initiative of its kind, will reach an estimated 15 million patients and caregivers each month and up to 200 million annually. 

Few U.S. Hospitals Can Fully Share Electronic Medical Records

Lisa Rapaport | Reuters | October 2, 2017

Less than one in three U.S. hospitals can find, send, and receive electronic medical records for patients who receive care somewhere else, a new study suggests. Just 30 percent of hospitals had achieved so-called interoperability as of 2015, the study found. While that’s slight improvement over the previous year, when 25 percent met this goal, it shows hospitals still have a long way to go, researchers report in Health Affairs...

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Tracking live brain activity with the new NeuBtracker open-source microscope

Press Release | Helmholtz Zentrum München, Technical University of Munich (TUM) | October 2, 2017

A team of scientists from the Helmholtz Zentrum München and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has successfully developed a new type of microscope. The so-called NeuBtracker is an open source microscope that allows to observe neuronal activities of zebrafish without perturbing their behavior. This is opening up completely new perspectives for science, because now it will be possible to track natural behavior while simultaneously imaging neuronal activity in the brain.

Humetrix Demonstrates DIRECT and Mobile Enabled Provider-to-Patient EHR Exchange for Interoperability with the Cerner EHR at Health 2.0 Fall Conference

Press Release | Humetrix | October 1, 2017

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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Flesh-eating Bacteria, Cancer-causing Chemicals, and Mold: Harvey and Irma's Lingering Health Threats

Julia Belluz | Vox | September 28, 2017

In the weeks following Hurricane Irma, parts of Florida have been awash in millions of gallons of sewage. Meanwhile, in Texas, oil refineries and chemical plants have dumped a year’s worth of cancer-causing pollutants into the air following Hurricane Harvey. In both states, doctors are on the lookout for an uptick in respiratory problems, skin infections, and mosquito-borne diseases brought on by the water and mold the storms left behind...

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FEMA Director Urges Americans to Develop “a true culture of preparedness” But No One Is Listening

Daisy Luther | The Organic Prepper | September 27, 2017

It looks like preppers aren’t that crazy after all. FEMA’s new director, Brock Long, has repeatedly said that Americans do not have a “culture of preparedness,” something that is much-needed with the startling uptick in natural disasters. Long has only been the director of FEMA since June 20 of this year and already has had to deal with a historic number of disasters in this short period of time. It appears that Mr. Long has a mindset of self-reliance based on a couple of recent statements he has made to the media, but the MSM doesn’t seem too interested in his ideas about fostering a culture of preparedness, despite the practicality and essential nature of his suggestions...

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White House Officials: To Manage the Government, Open Its Data

Jack Corrigan | Next Gov | September 26, 2017

White House officials see standardizing federal data as a crucial step to making government more effective and efficient. Opening that data to the public could also spur economic growth, they said. “Open data is not just a transparency exercise,” said acting Federal Chief Information Officer Margie Graves. “It really is integral to the management of government itself. Everybody recognizes that this is the platform on which we have to build our house”...

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HHS Seeks to Reorient Obamacare Innovation Center

Charles S. Clark | Government Executive | September 26, 2017

Even as the Trump administration works to repeal the Affordable Care Act, it is taking advantage of one of the 2010 law's provisions to advance its own take on health system innovation. Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, on Sept. 20 announced plans to redirect the six-year-old Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation within the Health and Human Services Department. Its mission is to test new approaches or models to pay for and deliver high-quality health care more efficiently...

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Considering Open Source Licenses

Phillip Ikuvbogie | A List Apart | September 26, 2017

What stage of development is your project in right now? Have you finished the planning phase? Are you going to work with a team? Will the project be split up into different modules? And so on. The principle of DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) has become an unwritten rule for developers. Instead of always starting from scratch on each new project, find ways to build upon previous work. This will save you time and other resources. In other words, do not reinvent the wheel; put to use the great work that others have perfected and made “freely” available for you to build upon...

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Sun Explosions & Space Hurricanes: The Silent Threat to Global Communications Systems

Staff Writer | RT | September 26, 2017

Plasma regularly escapes from the sun through eruptions on our star’s surface. Thankfully, the Earth is protected from these high energy particles due to the planet’s magnetic field – but they can result in potentially catastrophic ‘space hurricanes.' Even the smallest of particles exploding off the sun can have a huge impact in the development of so-called space hurricanes, due to a phenomenon known as the Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability. It means a dense radiation zone, known as the Van Allen belts, created by solar wind particles, effectively lays siege to the Earth...

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