These days, the only thing more American than apple pie is eating an animal raised on antibiotics. Eighty percent of antibiotics sold in the US go not to human patients, but to the nation’s plate-bound pigs, cows, turkeys, and chickens. As these wonder drugs became a mainstay of modern agriculture, factory farms began churning out another, far less welcome commodity—antibiotic resistant bacteria. These deadly new microbial threats are expected to claim the lives of 10 million people by 2050. How did this happen? And where does it end?...

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Whether or not you are aware of it, you have probably interacted with a chatbot – whether checking your finances, making a travel reservation, or even ordering a pizza. But what opportunities exist to use chatbots to assist humanitarians and development practitioners? Chatbots are conversational computer programs that can read message questions, interpret responses, and perform actions or make decisions, without any assistance from a live person on the other end...

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Smartphones and chatbots have made services from banking to transportation more accessible across Africa. Now, aid agencies are hoping they can do the same with food.
The UN’s World Food Program (WFP), has been experimenting with text and Facebook messenger chatbots to monitor food insecurity in hard-to-reach areas, turning smartphones and social media into lifelines for the most vulnerable of refugees...

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In the coming weeks and even months, residents of Houston and other parts of southern Texas hit hard by Hurricane Harvey will be faced with the public health disasters that can result from dirty floodwater and landslides. The natural disaster has ostensibly turned the city into a sprawling, pathogen-infested swamp...

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This week, a collaboration of private sector companies, the government, and not-for-profits hopes to deliver an EHR system to help Puerto Rico recover from Hurricane Maria, project leader Luis Belen told Morning eHealth's Darius Tahir. Belen, CEO of the non-profit, D.C-based National Health IT Collaborative for the Underserved, has been personally touched by the disaster: two of his aunts died because of the storm. The organization is coordinating with teams from HHS to bring a package of satellite phones, pre-loaded laptops, Amazon cloud storage, and an open-source software, OpenEMR+.

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Fifteen year old Sarafina, a female student in the capital city of Liberia, had a distressing problem at school: Her math teacher refused to give her a report card unless she had sex with him. Every day at school, he would request sexual favors and touch her inappropriately. Embarrassed, Sarafina kept the issue hidden from everyone, even her parents, until her father overheard a sexually harassing phone call the teacher made to their home. Sarafina’s father successfully confronted the man and got the report card, but his daughter was reprimanded for reporting her teacher’s sexual advances and forced to move to another school...

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On June 21, the Electronic Health Records Association held its second annual Shaping Usability of Health IT Summit. The event brought together more than 70 individuals, including physicians, EHR developers and even ONC Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health Technology Reform John Fleming. Mandy Long, chair of the EHRA Clinician Experience Workgroup and vice president of corporate operations at Modernizing Medicine, co-hosted the summit. In a recent phone interview, Long outlined a few key highlights of the event...

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With Florida still reeling from the effects of Hurricane Irma, a federal agency within the Department of Health and Human Services has issued draft guidance to help healthcare facilities with disaster planning and recovery for major hurricanes. Based on lessons learned from Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Harvey and others, the document—from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response—provides an overview of the “potential significant public health and medical response and recovery needs facing hurricane- and severe storm-affected areas.” Among the topics in the draft are those covering health information management...

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Four former national coordinators for health information technology have penned a perspective on achievements made in using electronic health records under the HITECH Act and where providers and the HIT industry still must go to continue past progress. The law spurred rapid progress toward digitizing the industry, which now is at an inflection point, say the authors, who include Vindell Washington, MD, Karen DeSalvo, MD, Farzad Mostashari, MD, and David Blumenthal, MD. EHRs have primed the industry to now achieve several positive results, including improving clinical guidelines, and sharing patient data seamlessly and securely...

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