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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Let me be clear: I believe strongly in the need for substantive, consumer-centric transformation of the health care system and have been a long-term proponent of the power of entrepreneurs to catalyze and drive these difficult changes. Despite this, I truly struggled to prepare for a recent presentation on the future of venture capital investing in the "digital health" space. The group I addressed expected another digital health pep rally – but, after much reflection, the best I could bring them was an explanation of why, despite the countless blog posts and questionable survey data to the contrary, I believe the digital health party is over and why those of us focused on long-term systemic transformation should be happy to put this hype cycle behind us...

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Irma, the largest Atlantic hurricane in recorded history, has proven cruelly fickle as it surges through the Caribbean. The Category Five storm “hit like a bomb” on the small islands of Barbuda and St. Martin, destroying up to 95 percent of the structures and rendering the areas “barely habitable.” But Irma stayed north of Puerto Rico, sparing the island from the worst. That’s not to say that Puerto Rico didn’t sustain damage...

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FEMA gets no respect. Consider: The two men who are supposed to be helping run the federal government’s disaster response agency had a pretty quiet late August. Even as a once-in-a-thousand-year storm barreled into Houston, these two veterans of disaster response—Daniel A. Craig and Daniel J. Kaniewski—found themselves sitting on their hands. Both had been nominated as deputy administrators in July, but Congress went on its long August recess without taking action on either selection—despite the fact that both are eminently qualified for the jobs.

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As Hurricane Harvey dropped anchor over Southeast Texas last week, Zello became the go-to app for rescuers working to save thousands of people trapped by floodwaters. Within days of Harvey's arrival, the app saw a 20-fold increase in usage in Houston, according to Bill Moore, the Austin based startup's the chief executive. As Hurricane Irma hurtles across the Caribbean toward the coast of Florida, Zello continues to boom in popularity. The free Internet "walkie-talkie" app - which relies on cellphone data plans or WiFi and is designed to operate in places where signals are weak - became the top app on iTunes and Google Play Wednesday...

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After watching nonstop coverage of the hurricane and the incredible rescues that were taking place, I got in bed at 10:30 on Tuesday night. I had been glued to the TV for days. Every time I would change the channel in an attempt to get my mind on something else for a few minutes, I was drawn right back in...

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Healthcare data analysts frustrated by the lack of access to large volumes of clean, trusted, and complete patient data can now take advantage of an open source EHR data generator platform called Synthea. One million synthetic patient records are currently available within the free online system, which uses HL7 FHIR to allow access to standardized datasets that mimic real electronic health records...

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Open source clouds, virtualization, and application management efforts are growing in healthcare as vendors are using tools that are meant to enhance deployment and management of applications. Kubernetes is one such tool that is becoming more popular in HIT infrastructure...

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