November 5th, 2009

Flu pandemic disproportionately infects, kills young people; are some getting preferred treatment?

Posted by Doug Hanchard @ November 5, 2009 @ 10:46 AM

Categories: Canada, HHS, Healthcare, Nova Scotia, Public health, State & Local Govt, UK

Tags: Team, Health Care, Flu, H1N1 Flu, NHL, Alberta Health Services Board, Team Management, Vertical Industries, Healthcare, Management

The Vancouver Sun reported that a study analyzing the first 1000 H1N1 cases in the State of California, reveals younger people were dying at a higher rate. This Flu season is one of the worst on record.

“If you’re under the age of 50, this is a bad flu. This might be the worst flu experienced in 50 to 100 years,” said Dr. Bela Matyas, acting chief of the emergency preparedness and response branch of the California Department of Public Health

“If you are a teenager or younger, the chances of dying from this flu are much, much higher than any other flu we’ve seen maybe since the 1918 flu.”

The Center for Disease Control website indicates that 2,025,700 doses of vaccine have been sent to California so far with more being shipped daily. Governments across all boundaries have ramped up to ensure everyone gets vaccinated. Web portals dedicated to Health in each region are plastered with information putting the H1N1 Flu as the #1 topic and primary focus ensuring that information is readily available.

Source of Graphic: Center for Disease Control

Read the rest of this entry »

September 13th, 2006

Mac users out in the cold again

Posted by Richard Koman @ September 13, 2006 @ 3:44 PM

Categories: Government technology, HHS

Tags: Apple Macintosh, Cold Calling, U.S. Department Of Health And Human Services, ZDNet Government

Once again, Mac users are left out in the cold on a government database aimed at a heavy-Mac using population, the Washington Post reports.

Earlier this year, the Department of Health and Human Services — a central manager of the Grants.gov system — promised that by November the system would be compatible with Macs, which are popular among scientists and academics. That was based on promises from Northrop Grumman Corp., which has been paid tens of millions of dollars to run Grants.gov for the government.

It still hasn’t been delivered. And now HHS has announced that Grumman had lost its bid to win a renewal of its contract. So what the odds for Mac users?

"That’s a question we have," said Grants.gov program manager John Etcheverry.

Just last week, Etcheverry said, Grumman delivered to HHS its first shot at a Mac-compatible version of its IBM-based grant application software for an initial round of testing by government experts.

Asked how it worked, Etcheverry said hesitantly: "It’s, to quote one of our testers, ‘It’s early.’ But it seems to be working."

The new vendor is General Dynamics Information Technology, which for $18.9 million promises to create a system that works with Mac, Unix and Linux as well as Windows.

The company’s vice president overseeing the Grants.gov project, Mary Biear, said the company will start with a platform-independent, off-the-shelf Adobe product, which it will modify in minor ways to fit the requirements of the government’s grant-application system.

"The first question for our team is . . . if users can use it," said Biear, who said she has seen the nascent product because the companies have begun a seven-week overlapping transition period. "If it’s working appropriately, [we] will maintain it and roll it out. If not, we would push it back."

The most optimistic schedule would be March but that will be too late for the Feb. 1 deadline to apply for NIH R01 research grants.

"The big NIH deadline is Feb. 1, 2007," said John S. Massa, associate director of the University of Iowa’s division of sponsored programs, in an e-mail. So a March release "isn’t going to help much." Norka Ruiz Bravo, NIH’s deputy director for extramural research, conceded the timing was awkward. Will the agency consider pushing back its deadline for an all-electronic submission process? "That is something we may want to think about," she said.

May 16th, 2006

Verifying medical credentials: Yet another Health IT task

Posted by ZDNet @ May 16, 2006 @ 1:53 PM

Categories: Government technology, HHS, Healthcare

Tags: Credential, Health Care, ZDNet

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, with the health infrastructure in tatters, authorities struggled to verify the credentials of doctors who arrived to offer help. Other areas also had trouble confirming qualifications of doctors who had left Louisiana to practice elsewhere.

That particular aspect of the disaster made no headlines but it was the subject of a conference in Washington recently, Government HealthIT reports. Will IT systems provide a way to credential doctors in the next emergency? Or will the same problems remain next year or five years from now?

“Credentials of the future will have to look very different from what they look like today,” said Dale Austin, senior vice president and chief operating officer of the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) and one of several experts who made presentations at the briefing “Medical Credentialing: Are We Ready?”

To get ready, public and private organizations at the national, state and local levels are developing independent IT solutions for verifying health care professionals’ identities, credentials, expertise and competence, panelists said. A primary objective of enhanced verification is to thwart the “fakers, con artists and artful dodgers” who would subvert the system for confirming medical professionals’ qualifications.

To make it through Katrina, the Federation of State Medical Boards set up ad hoc systems that verified 1,200 doctors’ licenses in a six-week period. Too often, however, verification took days. The Veterans Health Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs helped as well.

But verifying credentials is not all there is to it, said Christopher McLaughlin, director of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Emergency System for Advance Registration of Volunteer Health Professionals initiative.

“Hospitals are hesitant to accept volunteers who don’t have a high level of credential verification,” McLaughlin said. “It’s more than verifying identity.”

January 18th, 2006

CDC looks to cell phones for outbreak containment

Posted by ZDNet @ January 18, 2006 @ 5:58 PM

Categories: Disaster recovery, Government technology, HHS, Public health

Tags: ZDNet

It hasn’t happened yet, but what happens if and when avian flu starts to spread from person to person? Well, a lot of bad things, so the need for people in affected areas to take proactive measures is critical.

The Centers for Disease Control is experimenting with emerging technologies like "During an outbreak or emergency, getting good info to the public rapidly about what they need to do protect themselves is vital and can save lives," says CDC spokeswoman Jennifer Morcone.

At the Center for the Advancement of Distance Education (CADE) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, researchers are helping the CDC to develop an emergency alert system that would rely on the Global Positioning System (GPS) features built into many of today’s mobile handsets. In areas hit with an outbreak, people who carry GPS-enabled mobile phones and are subscribed to the alert service would receive an emergency alert text message with instructions about where to go or what to do during specific emergencies, such as an outbreak of anthrax or bird flu.

The problem is in knowing whom to contact. That’s where GPS comes in.  

In that way, people in areas hit with an outbreak could receive directions to the nearest medical clinic and be told what routes to take in an evacuation.

 "Using mobile devices could be an ideal way to communicate with people directly affected, because more than 200 million people in the U.S. subscribe to a mobile service," says Ken Hyers, principal mobile analyst at ABI, a technology research firm based in Oyster Bay, NY.

But naturally there are problems: privacy,  funding, logistics and network vulnerability.

 

Infrastructure such as cell towers and the T1 Internet lines that the cellular network depends on proved to be more reliable during Katrina than many expected. In fact, many people text-messaged each other reliably during the hurricane, according to Hyers. He says that, in some cases, Verizon and BellSouth arrived at disaster sites in New Orleans and before FEMA. Often they were able to replace backup power on cell tower generators and get T1s back up and running.

Infrastructure and privacy issues haven’t discouraged researchers in Japan, where mobile carrier KDDI, IBM Japan, and Kyoto University are collaborating on a real-time evacuation alert service for mobile phones. The service displays small readable maps and evacuation routes in the event of an earthquake or other natural disaster. A trial of the system is underway in Kyoto.

Well, Verizon looks pretty good compared to FEMA, but … this program is another reason that decentralizing networks is a good idea. 

January 12th, 2006

Your own genetic map is within reach

Posted by ZDNet @ January 12, 2006 @ 1:48 PM

Categories: Databases, Government technology, HHS, Healthcare, Privacy, Public health

Tags: Project, Volunteer, ZDNet

A new project at Harvard Medical School called the Personal Genome Project (PGP) is getting underway, possibly driving the cost of acquiring one’s own personal genetic map down to $1,000 by 2014, reports the Mercury News.

An offshooot of the Humune Genome Project, the massive government effort to sequence all 3 billion bits of human DNA, the PGP is the privately financed enterprise of George Church, 50, a leading genome expert at Harvard Medical School.

"The goal is to reduce costs to the point at which the genomes of individual humans could be sequenced as part of routine health care,” Church wrote in the journal Nature Reviews Genetics.

At this point, Church is the only volunteer for the program, but he predicts the project with gain a lot of momentum very quickly once people recognize that the benefits of the project outweigh the costs. "Eventually PGP may require millions of volunteers,” he said.

Church envisons a public government database where scientists and anyone else can see them. He acknowledged that such extraordinary openness carries risks as well as benefits. To encourage volunteers and allay fears, the project gives volunteers the option of keeping their data private.

"The prospect of this new type of personal information suddenly becoming widely available prompts worries about how it might be misused — by insurers, employers, friends, neighbors, commercial interests or criminals,” he acknowledged in the current issue of Scientific American.

September 28th, 2005

Federal sites improve in user satisfaction.

Posted by ZDNet @ September 28, 2005 @ 1:01 PM

Categories: E-government, Government technology, HHS

Tags: Vignette Corp., Web Site, Site, Portal, ZDNet

Even as netizens complain about FEMA’s website requiring  Internet Explorer  to register for  federal aid, the American Customer Satisfaction Index finds federal websites increasing in customer satisfaction.

The Index aggregate satisfaction score increased 1.2% for the quarter to 73.5 - which represents a 3.2% improvement from September 2004 and shows that online government maintains an upward trend even as citizens’ standards continue to rise. This increase parallels the year-over-year increase of 4.7% in the ACSI’s annual e-business measure released last month. The ACSI e-business index measures portals, search engines and news and information sites, categories that are comparable to most government sites in the Index. A total of 13 federal websites achieved satisfaction scores of 80 or above this quarter - a superior score for either private or public sector — while four sites were rated below a 60.

New to the index are three Social Security Administration sites - Help With Medicare Prescription Drug Costs, Internet Social Security Benefits Application, and Social Security Business Services Online.

Web Portals White Papers

• State Web Portals: Delivering and Financing E-Services - The Center for The Business of Government
• Buyer’s Guide for Federal, State and Local Governments Portals - Vignette
• State Web Portals: Delivering and Financing E-Service - National Electronic Commerce Coordinating Council
• Government Gateway: Developer Guide to Authentication and Authorisation Web Services - Secure and Public - Siemens
• Web Services, Government Portals and Content Management - Vignette
• Content Management, Portals, and Personalization - Phillip J. Windley
• Electronic Government: Opportunities and Challenges Facing the FirstGov Web Gateway - U.S. General Accounting Office
• A Secure Web Portal Solution for E-Government - Entrust
• Designing a Better Web Portal for Digital Government: A Web-Mining Based Approach - University of Toledo
• Designing a Better Web Portal for Digital Government: A Web-Mining Based Approach - University of Utah

September 20th, 2005

NY initiative advances cause of electronic medical health records

Posted by ZDNet @ September 20, 2005 @ 2:40 PM

Categories: Government technology, HHS, Public health, Web services

Tags: ZDNet

Hurricane Katrina showed the pressing need for electonic medical health records, an initiative that federal government officials are pressing hard. But the cost and complexity of the software has kept doctors from making the switch. According to Gartner, fewer than 5% of doctors use EMR software and among doctors practicing in groups of five or less the number is more like 3%, according to the Gartner Group.

One solution is the Taconic Network - a consortium of 500 doctors, hospitals, insurers and employers in New York’s Hudson Valley - which, the New York Times reports today, has created a Web-based approach to EMR software. For the modest sum of about $500 a month, small groups of doctors can make the move to electronic records. That compares quite favorably with the tens of thousands of dollars and the steep learning curve for traditional software.

According to the Times:

The Hudson Valley effort is being watched as a potential model by federal and state government and industry officials, who say that up to 60 percent of Americans receive their primary care at small-scale physicians’ offices. Unless those small medical practices can adopt the most modern and efficient information technology, millions of Americans may never know the benefits of the most advanced and safest care.

The Times quotes the federal government’s health information coordinator, Dr. David J. Brailer:

"My mantra is to ask, How can we make electronic medical records cheaper and more valuable to the doctor?" Dr. Brailer said. "These are grass-roots efforts that are filling a hole that the federal and state governments cannot respond to."

Obviously, Taconic is an example of web services and it’s a model for how systems of critical importance to government, whether they exist in public or private settings, are migrating to the modern paradigm of the Internet.  Check out how it works:

The key to the system is its secure shared database. "Instead of having dozens of systems in doctors’ offices, it is hosted on one facility," Dr. Blair said.

All a participating doctor needs is at least one computer terminal with high-speed access to the Internet, he said, and a router computer for security protection and antivirus software. Some doctors have flat screens in each examining room. Some have wireless tablets or laptops they take from room to room. Most have separate terminals for themselves and their nurses and administrative staffs.

The Taconic network supplies the training for doctors and their staffs and maintains local support centers to troubleshoot the inevitable challenges posed by new software.

"That’s what they need, that’s why I like this model," said Dr. Handler at the Gartner research group. Without such technical support for small medical practices, "it’s hard for them to get over the hurdles," he said.

September 13th, 2005

Free electronic health record software on hold

Posted by ZDNet @ September 13, 2005 @ 1:55 PM

Categories: E-government, Government technology, HHS, Public health

Tags: Software, Electronic Health Record, E-health, ZDNet

VistA-Office, free electronic health records (EHR) software developed for use by the Veterans Administration, will not be available to physicians anytime soon, the Dept. of Health and Human Services announced yesterday, according to Federal Computer Week.

Dr. Karen Bell, division director of the Quality Improvement Group at HHS’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told a conference audience that VistA-Office “is undergoing a review right now by the secretary’s office.… You can’t download anything” now.

VistA-Office, based on the EHR system that the Department of Veterans Affairs developed for use in VA hospitals and clinics, was supposed to be released in July and then in August.

Bell declined to speculate on what HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt would decide about releasing VistA-Office.

 No word on what the reason is for the hold-up or when it will be approved for release.

Electronic Health Records White Papers

• Implementing Electronic Records Management - Dell
• Archiving E-Mail: For Legal Reasons, Organizations Need to Bring Order to the Chaos of Electronic Communications Into Consideration - CDW
• PureEdge e-Government Solutions: Electronic Death Registration (EDR) Systems - PureEdge Solutions