News Clips
How to Fix the EHR Mess
Computers, more specifically, electronic health records (EHRs), will someday revolutionize the practice of medicine. In fact, successful computerization of medical care is the most critical step necessary to transform the American health-care system from its current sorry state to the 21st century system of our dreams. It is ironic, then, that today EHRs represent one of the worst problems plaguing medical professionals. At this point, many physicians would say that EHRs have created more problems than they have fixed. The most important question is how do we get from where we are to where we need to be?...
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HLN's Open Source Immunization Forecaster Receives 2017 Upshot Award
On June 6, 2017, HLN was awarded the 2017 Upshot Award for Excellence in Vaccine Supply, Access, and Use by the US Department of Health and Human Services National Vaccine Program Office (NVPO) for its ICE Open Source Immunization Forecaster. In the letter of award, Dr. Jewel Mullen, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health commented that, "HLN Consulting's efforts on the Immunization Calculation Engine (ICE) are impressive. This powerful tool-including its open-source nature and seamless integration into clinical workflows-holds great promise for improving clinical decision-support and ultimately vaccination rates. Thank you for daring to innovate, collaborate, and lead in an area that is not only complex, but constantly evolving."
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The Challenges of Bringing Health Care to Everyone, Everywhere
Around the world right now, more than one billion people don’t have access to basic health care. That means no checkups, no vaccinations, no medications, all because of the environment in which people live. They might be too poor to visit a clinic, or they might live too far from one, but the result is the same, and often fatal. It’s a problem that troubles many. Take physician Raj Panjabi, TED Prize winner and co-founder of Last Mile Health, who trains community health workers to bring care door-to-door in remote communities in Liberia (TED Talk: No one should die because they live too far from a doctor)...
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If You Care About Cities, Apple's New Campus Sucks
The new headquarters Apple is building in Cupertino has the absolute best door handles. The greatest! They are, as my colleague Steven Levy writes, precision-milled aluminum rails that attach to glass doors—sliding and swinging alike—with no visible bolts. Everything in this building is the best. The toroid glass of the roof curves scientifically to shed rainwater. And if it never rains again (this being California), well, an arborist selected thousands of drought-tolerant new trees for the 175-acre site...
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After Ebola, Liberia’s Health System on Path to Recovery
Shirley Kamara, 37, an expectant mother, smiled as she received medical care at C.H. Rennie Hospital in Kakata, just over 40 miles (68 km) north of Monrovia. “Our hospital is far better now since the Ebola outbreak,” she said. “We are encouraging our people to come here because everything is getting better.” C.H. Rennie Hospital in Liberia’s Margibi County was one of the facilities hardest-hit during the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) outbreak in 2014; 14 of its health workers died...
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Transparency Tool Seeks End to ‘Secret Pricing’
Noting that as much as $3.2 trillion a year in medical care is “secretly priced,” an entrepreneurial physician named Bill Hennessey is on a mission to unmask those costs for self-insured employers with the help of brokers and advisers. The secret weapon: an ability to identify by ZIP code known charges and claim allowables before services are actually rendered. The proprietary platform, Pratter, instantly identifies, itemizes and targets a host of outpatient procedures, seeks to break the confounding cycle of contractual arrangements with TPAs or insurance carriers that prevent employers from auditing their own claims...
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ONC’s John Fleming Wants Patients to Have a Single Unified Health record
A senior administrator with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT said he wants patients to have a unified health record that could pull data from various medical providers into a single record. John Fleming, the ONC’s deputy assistant secretary for health technology reform, outlined his vision that would give patients more control of their medical information during the International Summit on the Future of Health Privacy hosted by Georgetown University Law...
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MissingMaps: Chart a Course to Disaster Relief From Your Phone
Delivering life-saving aid to the middle of a war-zone or disaster area is no easy task. First, there’s the challenge of actually getting there. While navigation software now offers detailed maps of most cities, the uncharted villages and remote conflict zones served by Doctors Without Borders/Medécins Sans Frontières (MSF) are another beast entirely. Even though a remote village or unmarked street might be visible in satellite imagery, it can take MSF mappers months to locate, sketch, and code the kind of detailed digital maps aid workers rely on...
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Singapore’s Pragmatic Approach to Technology Disruptions
Conceived in 2014, Singapore’s National Health IT Masterplan is coming to fruition, with key projects such as the National Electronic Health Record (NEHR) system already in place. This was revealed by Singapore’s health minister Gan Kim Yong earlier this week at the opening of the National Health IT Summit, a gathering of top medical and IT practitioners in the city-state...
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HHS announces the Move Health Data Forward Phase 3 challenge winners
As part of its ongoing efforts to support the interoperable flow of health information, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) today announced the Phase 3 – and final – winners of the Move Health Data Forward Challenge. The multi-phase challenge focused on the development of applications allowing individuals to share their personal health information safely and securely with their health care providers, family members or other caregivers...
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HHS Announces the Move Health Data Forward Phase 3 Challenge Winners
As part of its ongoing efforts to support the interoperable flow of health information, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) today announced the Phase 3 – and final – winners of the Move Health Data Forward Challenge. The multi-phase challenge focused on the development of applications allowing individuals to share their personal health information safely and securely with their health care providers, family members or other caregivers...
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Microsoft Azure container team releases first open-source developer tool
At CoreOS Fest in San Francisco, Calif., Microsoft's Gabe Monroy, lead project manager for containers on Microsoft Azure, announced the release of Draft, a tool to streamline development of applications running on any Kubernetes cluster. With Draft, which Monroy said was the first open-source program to emerge from the Azure Container group, developers can use two simple commands to begin hacking on container-based applications with no knowledge of Docker or Kubernetes. "In fact," Monroy claimed, "developers don't even need Docker or Kubernetes installed to get going"...
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UNT Demonstrates First Ever Drone Provided Cell Service for Disaster Response
When disasters like tornadoes and hurricanes strike, they often take down the technology emergency workers desperately need to keep in contact — cellphone service. Now a professor at the University of North Texas is working to make sure those first responders can get that vital access through an airborne communication system...
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Remembrance of Things Past -- Bacterial Memory of Gut Inflammation
The microbiome, or the collections of microorganisms present in the body, is known to affect human health and disease and researchers are thinking about new ways to use them as next-generation diagnostics and therapeutics. Today bacteria from the normal microbiome are already being used in their modified or attenuated form in probiotics and cancer therapy. Scientists exploit the microorganisms' natural ability to sense and respond to environmental- and disease-related stimuli and the ease of engineering new functions into them. This is particularly beneficial in chronic inflammatory diseases like inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) that remain difficult to monitor non-invasively...
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Rural America Is the New ‘Inner City’
At the corner where East North Street meets North Cherry Street in the small Ohio town of Kenton, the Immaculate Conception Church keeps a handwritten record of major ceremonies. Over the last decade, according to these sacramental registries, the church has held twice as many funerals as baptisms. In tiny communities like Kenton, an unprecedented shift is under way. Federal and other data show that in 2013, in the majority of sparsely populated U.S. counties, more people died than were born—the first time that’s happened since the dawn of universal birth registration in the 1930s...
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