disaster response

See the following -

Can Citizen Journalism Move Beyond Crisis Reporting In Traditional Newsrooms?

Trevor Knoblich | FrontlineSMS | May 9, 2013

The aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings demonstrated yet another significant marker for citizen journalism. Felix Salmon, in an excellent post on the Reuters blog, wrote that the manhunt for a suspect in the bombings “in many ways represented the first fully interactive news story.” The crisis again demonstrated the value — and risks — of citizen reporting via social media. Read More »

Caribbean Center for Disaster Medicine (CCDM)

The Caribbean Center for Disaster Medicine (CCDM) is the result of a collaboration between American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine, Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and the government and community partners in St. Maarten and the Caribbean region. The CCDM is being created as a center of excellence to foster collaboration among professionals responsible for healthcare delivery, disaster preparedness, emergency response, and medical education.

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CDC Official Protests Federal Medical Response Cuts

Diane Barnes | Nextgov.com | April 29, 2014

More than half a decade of reductions to spending on state and local public-health agencies has already been "extremely damaging" to capabilities across the country for responding to unconventional attacks and other disasters, Dr. Ali Khan, director of the Public Health Preparedness and Response Office at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told Global Security Newswire in an interview. 

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Congressman Promotes Western NY Tech Economy

Anthony Brino | Government Health IT | December 20, 2012

While most of Washington D.C. is engulfed in fiscal cliff negotiations, Congressman Brian Higgins, a Democrat from western New York, is urging lawmakers to support wider use of electronic health records and is also touting his home region’s somewhat bustling health IT economy. Read More »

Covenant Park Integrated Initiatives, Inc.

Founded in 2007, Covenant Park builds large, integrated, complex programs for disaster preparedness and continuity. They provide their capabilities at the highest level of all three branches of the US government and for highly critical, global commercial operations. Covenant Park believes the complexity and interconnectedness of today's world requires an unprecedented level of coordination, analysis and communication to effectively identify and reduce risk. Read More »

Creating a High-Speed Internet Lane for Emergency Situations

During large disasters, like hurricanes, wildfires and terrorist attacks, people want emergency responders to arrive quickly and help people deal with the crisis. In order to do their best, police, medics, firefighters and those who manage them need lots of information: Who is located where, needing what help? And what equipment and which rescuers are available to intervene? With all of the technology we have, it might seem that gathering and sharing lots of information would be pretty simple. But communicating through a disaster is much more challenging than it appears...

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Crossing Boundaries By Tracing Buildings: Mapping Kathmandu From New York City"

Staff Writer | Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team | May 11, 2013

Throughout the day you could hear the simple question - 'Is that a building?' -- followed by conversations about shadows, and people, and the construction of a city that seemed so far away from our own... Read More »

Crowd-Funding Draws Donations For Sandy Relief

Brett Zongker | ABC News | December 22, 2012

In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, some who lost their homes or businesses have turned to crowd-funding websites to elicit a faster and more direct response than they could expect from the government or traditional charities. Read More »

Crowdsourcing Linked Open Data For Disaster Management

Jens Ortmann, Minu Limbu, Dong Wang, and Tomi Kauppinen | Mendeley | January 1, 2011

This paper shows how Linked Open Data can ease the chal- lenges of information triage in disaster response efforts. Recently, disaster management has seen a revolution in data collection. [...] Read More »

DARPA Robot Challenge: Disaster Recovery

Patience Wait | InformationWeek | July 23, 2013

Robots can go where humans can't in a disaster. See what the innovative machines in DARPA's next robotics challenge can do. Read More »

Developers from 156 Nations Work on Open Source Apps to Help Victims of Natural Disasters. Project OWL Wins 'Call for Code Global Prize'

Press Release | Call for Code Global Initiative | October 30, 2018

With the global reach and vision of Call for Code Creator David Clark Cause, Founding Partner IBM, and Charitable Partners United Nation Human Rights and The American Red Cross, the largest engagement of developers in history culminated with the Call for Code Global Prize winners and finalists being celebrated last night during a gala event globally broadcast from The Regency Ballroom in San Francisco. Knowing that people suffer when communications are destroyed when natural disasters strike, Project OWL is an innovative software/hardware solution that includes an offline communication infrastructure, providing first responders with a simple experience for managing all aspects of disaster response.

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Disaster Relief Now From DrupalCon

Michael D. Roden | OpenSource.com | June 3, 2013

In an overnight, grassroots movement, the open source platform Drupal has made an impact in Oklahoma. A group of more than 70 volunteer code sprinters—made up of developers, designers, and sys admins—congregated late Tuesday night at DrupalCon in Portland to create help4ok.org. Read More »

Doctors and Disaster Relief: Technology and Data for HealthTap

Andy Oram | EMR & EHR | February 2, 2016

In November 2015, when Tamil areas of southwestern India suffered from serious monsoon-related flooding that killed hundreds and caused the major city Chennai to essentially shut down for a week, local residents asked for help from an unusual source: HealthTap, the online service that offers medical advice and concierge care. This article explains the unique technical and organizational resources HealthTap offered, making it a valuable source of information for anyone in the disaster area with a cell phone or Internet access. At the end I will ask: what can public health institutions do to replicate HealthTap’s success in aiding the people of Chennai?

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Fax Technologies Take Center Stage at HIMSS19 Exhibition

One of the most surprising developments at HIMSS19 is the large number of companies exhibiting their Fax Technologies. Long derided by reporters, health IT consultants, and EHR vendors, fax technologies have been growing in leaps and bounds while EHRs continue to fail to deliver interoperability. Just a couple of years ago faxes were used in around 75% of medical records exchanges. Latest numbers indicate that faxes are now used to exchange more than 85% of medical records. Most people would react in horror to such figures. How could physicians and medical personnel rely on antiquated paper technologies like faxes? The real story to be found on the exhibit floor at the HIMSS 2019 conference is that what we are seeing is a rapid transition to digital fax technologies and platforms. And this transition is taking place because physicians and medical staff have figured out they work!

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FEMA Was Overwhelmed by Hurricanes and Wildfires in 2017, GAO Says

Erin Ailworth | Wall Street Journal | September 4, 2018

The back-to-back devastation of hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, followed by catastrophic wildfires in California, overwhelmed federal disaster responders in 2017, according to a government report released Tuesday. The unprecedented sequence of storms and fires forced Federal Emergency Management Agency staff to jump from one disaster to another and in some cases use uncertified workers to fill key roles. “They were 30% understaffed when Harvey hit,” said Chris Currie, director of emergency management issues at the Government Accountability Office, which wrote Tuesday’s report. “By the time Maria hit Puerto Rico, they were down to the bottom of the barrel.”

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