News Clips
California's Blackouts Reveal Health Care's Fragile Power System
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 »
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Caribbean Center for Disaster Medicine to Host Second Annual Conference in Sint Maarten
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 »
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Tidelift and NumFOCUS partner to support essential community-led open source data science and scientific computing projects
NumFOCUS, a nonprofit supporting better science through open code, and Tidelift today announced a partnership to support open source libraries critical to the Python data science and scientific computing ecosystem. NumPy, SciPy, and pandas-sponsored projects within NumFOCUS-are now part of the Tidelift Subscription. Working in collaboration with NumFOCUS, Tidelift financially supports the work of project maintainers to provide ongoing security updates, maintenance and code improvements, licensing verification and indemnification, and more to enterprise engineering and data science teams via a managed open source subscription from Tidelift.
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Humana And Microsoft Announce Multiyear Strategic Partnership To Reimagine Health For Aging Populations And Their Care Teams
On Monday, Humana and Microsoft Corp. announced a strategic partnership focused on building modern health care solutions for Humana members aimed at improving their health outcomes and making their health care experiences simpler to navigate. Using the power of Microsoft's Azure cloud, Azure AI, and Microsoft 365 collaboration technologies, as well as interoperability standards like FHIR, Humana will develop predictive solutions and intelligent automation to improve its members' care by providing care teams with real-time access to information through a secure and trusted cloud platform.
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Azure API for FHIR moves to general availability
Today, Microsoft becomes the first cloud with a fully managed, first-party service to ingest, persist, and manage healthcare data in the native FHIR format. The Azure API for FHIR® is releasing today in generally availability to all Azure customers...With the Azure API for FHIR, a developer, researcher, device maker, or anyone working with health data-is empowered with a turnkey platform to provision a cloud-based FHIR service in just minutes and begin securely managing PHI data in Azure.
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Regenstrief Institute Research Scientist Theresa Cullen, M.D., Receives Women In Leadership Award
Regenstrief Institute research scientist Theresa Cullen, M.D., has won a Leading for Impact, Women in Leadership award. The award recognizes women who are creating impact and leading programs across the federal technology, health and consulting community. The award is given by FedHealthInnovation & Technology (FedHealthIT), which is a consolidated news source for information related to federal health agencies. Dr. Cullen also is the associate director of the Regenstrief Institute Global Health Informatics program and the interim director of strategic planning and communications for LOINC. She recently led a project to help the United States government's Indian Health Service identify and define its needs for a new health information technology system.
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AUC Medical School Students Hold Inaugural Disaster Preparedness and Response TEDx Event in St. Maarten
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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Joint Study between VA and UL shows UL Cybersecurity Standard provides robust risk management for connected medical devices
The U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) and UL, a global safety science organization, today announced the completion of a two-year Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) Program for medical device cybersecurity. As medical devices are susceptible to cybersecurity attacks, creating both patient safety risks and disclosure risks for protected health information, the VA and UL sought to address an existing gap in the marketplace for cybersecurity standards and practical certification approaches for connected medical devices. With the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) revolutionizing patient care, increasing efficiency and improving healthcare quality, the VA aimed to find solutions for securing large-scale IoMT device deployments supporting mission-critical care delivery for roughly nine million patients under its care. Read More »
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UNICEF launches Cryptocurrency Fund to Support Open Source Technology Benefiting Children
UNICEF will now be able to receive, hold and disburse donations of cryptocurrencies ether and bitcoin, through its newly-established UNICEF Cryptocurrency Fund. In a first for United Nations organizations, UNICEF will use cryptocurrencies to fund open source technology benefiting children and young people around the world. Under the structure of the UNICEF Cryptocurrency Fund, contributions will be held in their cryptocurrency of contribution, and granted out in the same cryptocurrency. "This is a new and exciting venture for UNICEF," said Henrietta Fore, UNICEF Executive Director. "If digital economies and currencies have the potential to shape the lives of coming generations, it is important that we explore the opportunities they offer. That's why the creation of our Cryptocurrency Fund is a significant and welcome step forward in humanitarian and development work." Read More »
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WELL Health launches OSCAR McMaster Professional Edition with McMaster University
WELL Health Technologies Corp...is pleased to announce the formation of WELL EMR Group. The WELL EMR Group will be the Company's single entity encompassing its EMR assets to offer physicians across the country one place to go for all of their EMR needs. "One of the key missions we had when entering healthcare was to break down the siloed approach that has hindered the ability for care to be delivered efficiently," said Hamed Shahbazi, CEO of WELL Health. "By introducing a single nationwide group for our EMR initiatives, we want to elevate our efforts to drive enhanced innovation and security for doctors on our platform without the constraints of managing multiple regional brands, teams and code bases." Read More »
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The World Knows an Apocalyptic Pandemic Is Coming
A new independent report compiled at the request of the United Nations secretary-general warns that there is a "very real threat" of a pandemic sweeping the planet, killing up to 80 million people. A deadly pathogen, spread airborne around the world, the report says, could wipe out almost 5 percent of the global economy. And we're not ready. The ominous analysis was compiled by an independent panel, the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB), which was assembled last year in response to a request from the office of the U.N. secretary-general, and convened jointly by the World Bank and World Health Organization (WHO). Co-chaired by the former WHO head and former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland and the head of the international Red Cross, Elhadj As Sy, the GPMB commissioned expert studies and issued a scathing attack on the political, financial, and logistical state of pandemic preparedness affairs.
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careMESH Receives 2015 Edition ONC Health IT Certification
careMESH, the only service provider to guarantee digital delivery of patient health information to any U.S.-based clinician, announced that it has achieved ONC-Health IT 2015 Edition Health IT Module Certification for reporting on the delivery of transitions of care. This ONC-Health IT Certification gives customers the assurance that careMESH can be used for digital communications and its reports can be used in Promoting Interoperability attestation. "Achieving 2015 ONC certification was important so that our customers could not only rely on careMESH for digital communications with the outside world, but also on our reports for attestation," said careMESH President and COO, Justin Sims.
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Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense is now the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense
Now in its 5th year, the Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense is taking on a new name to more accurately reflect its work and the urgency of its mission. Effective immediately, the organization now will be known as the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense. "We do not simply study the problem," said Executive Director Dr. Asha M. George. "We conduct our activities with a self-imposed mandate and the same sort of urgency that congressional commissions demonstrate. Moving forward, we will be the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense. Our leadership team and unyielding focus remain unchanged." Read More »
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Confronting Catastrophic Disasters With 21St Century Technologies
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 »
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Commentary: Ebola is Raging Again - And The U.S. Is Not Ready
Today, the threat from Ebola is more serious. The World Health Organization has declared it to be a global public health emergency because Ebola has again defied controls and spread to the city of Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where it could in turn spread throughout more densely populated urban areas and gain access to the global transportation system. We support this declaration and the additional resources and attention it should bring to the situation, but the WHO should have made it earlier. Ebola was an emergency long before it spread to Goma.
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