local health departments

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Coronavirus Adds New Stress To Antiquated Health Record-Keeping

Darius Tahir | Politico | March 11, 2020

The U.S. health care system is on the leading edge of many technologies - except when it comes to passing information between doctors, laboratories, and public health officials. And that could add another snarl to the already troubled effort to test for coronavirus. Overreliance on faxing, phones and paper records is problem enough in ordinary times. Adding thousands of coronavirus tests a day will test the ability of providers, labs, and public health officials to keep track of all the results. Because not all results are automatically downloaded into physicians' records, the doctors may need to log into laboratory web portals or, if all else fails, turn to faxes and phones to learn test results.

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HHS Ventures Team Helps Detect Disease Outbreaks

It was a no brainer for the HHS Ventures Fund to include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) GHOST project in its latest round of funding. There are about 3.5 million Americans infected with Hepatitis C (HCV), which attacks the liver and can lead to cirrhosis and other serious health problems, according to the latest data collected by the CDC. This CDC Ventures team is developing a cloud-based, public health research tool to help state and local health departments more quickly detect and fight the spread of disease. The team calls their system GHOST – Global Hepatitis Outbreak Surveillance Technology...

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Hiding Our Heads in the Sand - Why the US is Unprepared for Pandemics and Disasters

A new report from the Trust for America's Health minces no words. President and CEO John Auerbach charges: COVID-19 has shined a harsh spotlight on the country's lack of preparedness for dealing with threats to Americans' well-being. Years of cutting funding for public health and emergency preparedness programs has left the nation with a smaller-than-necessary public health workforce, limited testing capacity, an insufficient national stockpile, and archaic disease tracking systems - in summary, twentieth-century tools for dealing with twenty-first-century challenges.

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Majority of States Score 6 or Lower Out of 10 Indicators in Report on Health Emergency Preparedness

Press Release | Trust for America’s Health, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation | December 19, 2012

Washington, D.C., December 19, 2012 – In the 10th annual Ready or Not? Protecting the Public from Diseases, Disasters, and Bioterrorism report, 35 states and Washington, D.C. scored a six or lower on 10 key indicators of public health preparedness. Read More »

Prevention Defense: Service Providers Must Pitch in to Help Cash-strapped Local Health Departments

Robert Pestronk | NACCHO | June 7, 2012

Basic health and safety protections that people take for granted are seriously threatened by the current adverse economic conditions. Budget cuts and job losses in industry have been big news for more than a year, but local health departments have been hard hit, too. Read More »