Florida

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CMS To Invest $5+ Billion a Year in Open Source and Cloud-based IT Infrastructure for Medicaid

After more than 40 years of relying on monolithic mainframe platforms to administer its services, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has embraced a new modular, open and agile approach to Medicaid health information technology for the Federal government and States. In many ways, this is the best of what open source advocates and technology innovators could have hoped for when it comes to open source policy from a government agency. According to Andrew Slavitt, Acting Administrator of CMS, the agency will spend more than $5 billion a year to fund this transformation.

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Drones Are More Helpful than Ever in Hurricane-Ravaged Texas and Florida

Thom Patterson | CNN | September 25, 2017

Unmanned aircraft — small and large — swooped in during the aftermath of Hurricanes Irma and Harvey to get a glimpse of the devastation. That's why insurance companies have been using drone technology more than ever before to quickly -- and safely -- assess damage from the storm. It's only been fairly recently that commercial drone technology has advanced enough to take on this task on a large economic scale. And the insurance industry is just beginning to fully embrace it...

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Florida Doctors Weigh Higher Costs For Medical Record Copies

Kyle Murphy | EHR Intelligence | August 2, 2013

A hearing in Florida is considering a petition to increase the costs of reproducing patient medical records scheduled to begin Friday morning at the DoubleTree by Hilton in Deerfield Beach, according to the Tampa Bay Times. (Apparently, the Blue Button has yet to come to this part of the Sunshine State.) Read More »

Florida Patients, Lawyers Face Steep Fees For Record Copies

Jennifer Bresnick | EHR Intelligence | December 6, 2013

EHRs aren’t doing much to streamline the documentation reproduction process for providers, patients, and legal teams in Florida.  After proposing a hike in the per-page rate to produce copies of patient records this summer, the Florida Board of Medicine has followed through by determining that whether a record is paper or electronic, patients and lawyers asking for files on their clients’ behalf will fork over nearly four times the current rate. Read More »

Hazard and Evacuation Map Now Available for Hurricane Irma Affected Areas

Press Release | Mapbox | September 10, 2017

Mapbox has published a new map to give residents and officials in Florida the most up-to-date information on the areas with the highest risk of hazardous materials in flood waters. The most up-to-date map can be found here and includes a list of shelters, power plants, chemical plants, solid waste facilities, evacuation routes and evacuation zones...

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HHS Offers Hurricane Guidance to Healthcare Facilities

Greg Slabodkin | Health Data Management | September 13, 2017

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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How Do Hospitals Know What To Do When Hurricanes Approach?

We all expect hospitals to be open and operating when we need them, but extreme weather events like hurricanes are a strain on resources and pose significant challenges for hospitals. Closing a hospital is an extreme action, but several hospitals in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina did just that before the arrival of Hurricane Irma in 2017.With more than 300 hospitals and a higher share of older adults than any other state, emergency plans for Florida’s hospitals were a critical issue facing emergency planners during those storms. This is true now as well as Hurricane Dorian approaches the state.

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How Open Government Is Helping With Hurricane Relief in Puerto Rico

Just weeks after Hurricane Harvey hit Texas, two more "unprecedented" hurricanes made their way to the southeastern United States. Although changes in Hurricane Irma's path spared Florida from the bulk of the damage, both Irma and Maria directly hit Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Hurricane Maria was particularly devastating for the more than 3.5 million American citizens living in these U.S. Caribbean territories. The CEO of Puerto Rico's sole electric company indicated that the grid had been "basically destroyed." Without electricity, communications were severely limited. In the aftermath of a natural disaster, embracing open government principles—such as open data, collaboration between citizens and government, and transparency—can save lives.

Hurricanes Harvey and Irma Draw the Line - Time for the US to Embrace Open Source Emergency and Disaster Response

For nearly 20 years now the global open source community and applications have been a keystone to disaster relief efforts around the world. The enormous number of disaster relief applications and knowledge that has been developed through all these years, should, and needs to be leveraged in the current crisis. For that reason, Open Health News is starting a series of articles to highlight some of the most important solutions. A substantial portion the open source applications for emergency and disaster response that exist are actually already on the news website in the form of articles and resource pages.

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Insurance Policies Are Canceled In New Hurdle For Obamacare

Alex Nussbaum | SF Gate | October 29, 2013

The Obamacare rollout is leading to the cancellation of hundreds of thousands of health insurance plans nationwide, contradicting President Barack Obama’s repeated pledge that people who like their coverage can keep it. Read More »

Millions of Americans Live Nowhere Near a Hospital, Jeopardizing Their Lives

Caitlin Ostroff and Ciara Bri'd Frisbie | CNN | August 3, 2017

As a nurse practitioner, Wanda Liddell knew it was a medical emergency when she saw one of her patients struggling to breathe last month. But in her backcountry town of Cross City, Florida, the ambulance took 30 minutes to arrive. Even worse, it was another 45 miles to the nearest hospital. Liddell faces this situation often and always wonders, what if? She is one of many medical providers working in towns 30 miles or more from a hospital, a distance that can make the difference between life or death...

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Mirth and Pfizer Reach Licensing Agreement for InformaCare®, Mirth Launches Advanced Care Management Platform for Patient Centered Medical Homes and Accountable Care Organizations

Press Release | Mirth Corporation, Pfizer, Inc. | April 5, 2011

Mirth Corporation, the leader in commercial open source healthcare information technology, enables the rapid and secure exchange of critical patient information within healthcare delivery organizations and across broad geographies. Now Mirth’s client organizations rolling out Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH) and Accountable Care Organization (ACO) initiatives can harness these data sources to power comprehensive, cloud-based care management services with minimal overhead.

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Mirth Technology to Power Statewide Health Information Exchange in Florida

Press Release | Mirth Corporation | February 10, 2011

Mirth Corporation, the leader in commercial open source healthcare information technology, announced the selection of its open and standards-based healthcare interoperability suite to power the planned statewide Health Information Exchange (HIE) in Florida. As part of the HIE implementation, Mirth technology will be made available to all healthcare providers statewide, delivered on the Mirth appliance framework. Read More »

MIT Map Offers Real-Time, Crowd-Sourced Flood Reporting during Hurricane Irma

Press Release | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | September 8, 2017

As Hurricane Irma bears down on the U.S., the MIT Urban Risk Lab has launched a free, open-source platform that will help residents and government officials track flooding in Broward County, Florida. The platform, RiskMap.us, is being piloted to enable both residents and emergency managers to obtain better information on flooding conditions in near-real time...

One Nation, One EHR –The Direct Project

CureMD | CureMD EMR Blog | January 8, 2013

The essence of Health Information Exchange (HIE) lies in easily accessible health information to improve the quality of care delivered by the healthcare community. Complicated formats intrinsic to many EHR systems are generally counterproductive to this basic nature of HIEs and can prove to be a hindrance against delivering quality care. So the natural question arises... Read More »