Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC)

See the following -

Growing Use of GIS Maps by the Government & Healthcare Organizations

Geoplatform.gov is up and running and growing more robust with every passing month. This resource is hosted and supported by the General Services Administration (GSA). This is the same U.S. government agency  that also hosts the government's national repository of government data sets known as Data.gov. The Geospatial Platform is a web-based solution for providing shared and trusted geospatial data, services, and applications for use by the public and by government agencies and partners to meet their mission needs. It was developed by the member agencies of the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) in collaboration with public and private sector partners and stakeholders.

Read More »

HIMSS19: Open Source Software for Disaster Preparedness and Response

Although not officially listed as a track at the HIMSS19 conference, there are a series of very important presentations on the use of open source software for disaster preparedness and response. This is a critical topic that we have covered extensively in Open Health News. As we detailed in this article, there was a major failure in being able to provide victims of Hurricane Harvey, as well as Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria with access to their medical records. Few emergency medical responders could access their records either. The two success stories that came out of the hurricanes were two open source electronic health record (EHR) systems, OpenEMR and the VA's open source VistA EHR.

Read More »

Hospital Antibiotic Use Can Put Patients At Risk, Study Says

Lena H. Sun | The Washington Post | March 4, 2014

Doctors in some hospitals prescribe up to three times as many antibiotics as doctors at other hospitals, putting patients at greater risk for deadly superbug infections, according to a federal study released Tuesday. Read More »

Hospitals Demand Payment Upfront From ER Patients With Routine Problems

Phil Galewitz | Kaiser Health News | February 20, 2012

Next time you go to an emergency room, be prepared for this: If your problem isn't urgent, you may have to pay upfront. Last year, about 80,000 emergency-room patients at hospitals owned by HCA, the nation's largest for-profit hospital chain, left without treatment after being told they would have to first pay $150 because they did not have a true emergency. Read More »

Jembi Combines Efforts With Safe Blood For Africa & CDC!

Press Release | Jembi Health Systems | June 6, 2013

Jembi is excited to announce a promising collaboration with Safe Blood for Africa and CDC towards the objectives of expanding the knowledge pool and ability to support an existing Open Source Blood Service Management tool (V2V). Read More »

Living Sick And Dying Young In Rich America

Leah Sottile | The Atlantic | December 19, 2013

Chronic illness is the new first-world problem. Read More »

Look How Quickly The U.S. Got Fat (1985-2010 Animated Map)

James Hamblin | The Atlantic | April 11, 2013

This shows the percentages of the U.S. population medically defined as obese, which means a body mass index of 30 or greater. BMI isn't an ideal metric to evaluate obesity, but it's still what the U.S. standardly uses. Read More »

Mobile Health Apps Have Role In Ebola Crisis

Neil Polwart | Information Week Healthcare | August 25, 2014

Mobile health apps could play a bigger role than they have to date in speeding the response to a global health crisis...

Read More »

Mobile Health Apps Have Role In Ebola Crisis

Neil Polwart | Information Week Healthcare | August 25, 2014

Mobile health apps could play a bigger role than they have to date in speeding the response to a global health crisis...

Read More »

Mystery Lung Fungus: Are You At Risk?

Kiera Butler and Brett Brownell | Mother Jones | August 12, 2013

Valley fever is hard to diagnose, even harder to treat, and potentially fatal—and the number of cases is rising dramatically. Read More »

New Evidence That Sugar Is Harming Our Hearts

Alice G. Walton | Forbes | February 3, 2014

If the torrent of studies suggesting that sugar is bad for our health wasn’t quite enough, new research again suggests that added dietary sugar increases the risk of death from heart disease. Read More »

NIH And CDC Launch Registry For Sudden Death In The Young

Diana Manos | Government Health IT | October 24, 2013

The National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have announced they are collaborating to create the Sudden Death in the Young Registry to help researchers work on preventing these type of deaths in the future. Read More »

Number of Painkiller-addicted Newborns Triples in 10 Years

Liz Szabo | USA Today | May 1, 2012

The number of babies born addicted to the class of drugs that includes prescription painkillers has nearly tripled in the past decade, according to the first national study of its kind. Read More »

Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Death Points To Broader Opioid Drug Epidemic

Joel Achenbach | Washington Post | February 7, 2014

The death last Sunday of ­Oscar-winning actor Philip ­Seymour Hoffman at age 46 ­focused media attention on the nationwide surge in heroin use and overdoses. But the very real heroin epidemic is framed by an even more dramatic increase since the beginning of the century in overdoses from pharmaceutical drugs known as opioids. Read More »

Physicians Eager but Unprepared to Meet Meaningful Use Requirements

Dan Bowman | Fierce Health IT | April 25, 2012

Although roughly half of physicians in a recent survey said they planned to apply to the Meaningful Use incentive program in 2011, few would have qualified for payments because their electronic health record systems would not have met enough of the Stage 1 core requirements, according to a study published this week in Health Affairs. Read More »