Patients will be able to access a telemedicine system for medical advice
Jan 23, 2011 11:29 PM | By KEVIN SHALVEY
Imagine you're a two-day trip away from the nearest doctor and are starting to experience flu-like symptoms, but you're unsure if it's malaria, swine flu or merely a common cold.
Why not just SMS a doctor and be diagnosed over the phone?
By March, you'll be able to do just that.
Telemedicine, as long-distance diagnosing, teaching and monitoring is known, will soon be introduced across the country, said executives of MTN and Sanlam, who have teamed up to develop and launch the technology.
“What it means is that a number of services can be offered through the mobile phone,” said MTN corporate affairs executive Rich Mkhondo yesterday. “You would be able to speak to a health professional qualified to diagnose.”
Sanlam Health CEO Grant Newton said the two companies have spent more than 10 years developing a series of questions that patients will answer by SMS or on the phone, which will enable doctors to diagnose 340 diseases.
GAO-11-99 December 17, 2010
A catastrophic public health event could threaten our national security and cause hundreds of thousands of casualties. Recognizing the need for efficient sharing of real-time information to help prevent devastating consequences of public health emergencies, Congress included in the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act in December 2006 a mandate for the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), in collaboration with state, local, and tribal public health officials, to develop and deliver to Congress a strategic plan for the establishment and evaluation of an electronic nationwide public health situational awareness capability. Pursuant to requirements of the act, GAO reviewed HHS's plans for and status of efforts to implement these capabilities, described collaborative efforts to establish a network, and determined grants authorized by the act and awarded to public health entities. GAO assessed relevant strategic planning documents and interviewed HHS officials and public health stakeholders.
HHS did not develop and deliver to congressional committees a strategic plan that demonstrated the steps to be taken toward the establishment and evaluation of an electronic public health situational awareness network, as required by PAHPA. While multiple offices within HHS have developed related strategies that could contribute to a comprehensive strategic plan for an electronic public health information network to enhance situational awareness, these strategies were not developed for this purpose. Instead, the offices developed the strategies to address their specific goals, objectives, and priorities and to meet requirements of executive and statutory authorities that mandated the development of strategies for nationwide health information exchange, coordinated biosurveillance, and health security. However, HHS has not defined a comprehensive strategic plan that identifies goals, objectives, activities, and priorities and that integrates related strategies to achieve the unified electronic nationwide situational awareness capability required by PAHPA. The department has developed and implemented information technology systems intended to enable electronic information sharing to support early detection of and response to public health emergencies; however, these systems were not developed as part of a comprehensive, coordinated strategic plan as required by PAHPA. Instead, they were developed to support ongoing public health activities over the past decade, such as disease and syndromic surveillance. Without the guidance and direction that would be provided by an overall strategic plan that defines requirements for establishing and evaluating the capabilities of existing and planned information systems, HHS cannot be assured that its resources are being effectively used to develop and implement systems that are able to collect, analyze, and share the information needed to fulfill requirements for an electronic nationwide public health situational awareness capability.
http://www.citizencommandcenter.org/quick/start The purpose of this site is to provide a central location to find resource status information for disaster zones and to help regions prepare for disaster.
Disaster Response
Disaster Preparedness
On-going Human Services
We aim to enter command & control information for regions IN ADVANCE of a disaster, AND immediately following, so as to help relief groups hit the ground running, and to help survivors immediately locate services and supplies in the event of a disaster in their region. This command & control information might be as simple as entering the name and cell phone for groups that are prepared to be first responders in a region. Or if a region's disaster community chooses, it can mean entering a list of disaster response units and/or facilities that are on “standby” for disaster response activity. There are many disaster response “command and control” systems in use by VOADs and EMA organizations. We hope to compliment what these established systems offer and we hope to offer unaffiliated groups a method for tracking their own needs and resources.
For a look into the vaccine conflict, see Frontline's “The Vaccine War“. For counter-vaccine viewpoints, Vaccineinitiative.org hosts white papers, articles, opinion pieces, scholarly reports from scientists, physicians, activists, who are offering constructive challenges to the belief of the safety and efficacy of vaccines.
Gary Null Speaking Out at the NYS Assembly Hearing | 10-13-2009 | (part 1 of 3)
MassChallenge has awarded OsmoPure, an NCIIA E-Team, one of its four $100,000 prizes. See announcement.
OsmoPure, from Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, is developing a low-cost water purification device for developing countries based on simple membrane filtration technology. The team showcased the invention at NCIIA's student innovation showcase in San Francisco earlier this year.
