Archive for the ‘Healthcare’ Category:
23 Nov
Cited: InformationWeek
When many of the older people in our society through the name “Lockheed”, they think airplanes. However, the company has diversified into many areas including healthcare and information technology. In fact, Lockheed Martin has been awarded $170 million in contracts from the federal Department of Health and Human Resources. Lockheed Martin has been contracted to help improve the patients he in government health information systems.
One of the agreements, worth $142 million, is for desktop support, help desk, and call center services under the HHS Program Support Center ID/IQ contract. The contract has a 3-year base period and four 1-year options.
Under the National Institutes of Health Office of Computer and Communications Systems Software Support Services task orders, Lockheed Martin will provide HHS with desktop support services, help desk and call center services, systems administration and email support, and general operations and maintenance. The consolidated task order has a three-year base period and four one-year options.
For the National Institutes of Health Office of Computer and Communications Systems Software Support Services, Lockheed Martin will provide support in web and application design and development, database design, infrastructure analysis and planning, network and system operations, and information assurance and system and network security. The contract has a 5-year base period with four 1-year options. The $28 million contract has a 5-year base period with four 1-year options.
Lockheed Martin provides IT services to healthcare providers in the U.S. government, including the Center for Disease Control, Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, Federal Occupational and Health, Social Security Administration, and Department of Defense and Department of Veteran Affairs. Lockheed specializes in security technology products and services, with 140,000 employees and sales of $42.7 billion. The company’s health team employs 2,500.
“The transformation of our healthcare system is a priority for this nation,” said Steve Lubniewski, vice president, Lockheed Martin Health Solutions, in a statement. “For Lockheed Martin, it’s a challenge of human security: How are we advancing technology to support our customers in their mission to deliver accessible, quality healthcare? It starts with work like this — ensuring the efficient and secure operation of the health systems that serve America’s citizens.”
Lockheed Martin is a veteran federal IT contractor. The company said in May that it would assemble a team of subcontractors to bid for a contract to build a secure information systems network for the U.S. Navy’s surface fleet. The company was also part of a $493 million agreement with prime contractor Computer Science Corp. to manage IT for the Transportation Security Administration. The U.S. government spends $200 million daily on IT.
Lockheed Martin has been providing IT services to the healthcare community for nearly two decades, serving customers such as the Centers for Disease Control, Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services, Federal Occupational and Health, the Social Security Administration, and the Department of Defense and Department of Veteran Affairs. The company’s Health team includes more than 2,500 highly skilled clinical, scientific and technical professionals with expertise in health IT, research, bioinformatics and medical services.
Lockheed Martin is a global security company headquartered in Bethesda, Md. They employabout 140,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration and sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and services. The reported sales for 2008 were $42.7 billion.
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My Take: When I started to read this article, I could not figure out what an airline manufacturer was doing for healthcare. Then I decided to do a little research and discovered that they have diversified, a lot. In fact, there is a merger between Lockheed Corporation and Martin Marietta Corporation back in 1995. Lockheed Corporation began back in 1912 as Loughead Aircraft Manufacturing Company.
In 1912 when the company began, they were actually called Alco Hydro-Aeroplane Company. But, in later years they went bankrupt because of the Great Depression and were brought out of receivership for a mere $40,000. Lockheed was made famous by record-setting flights by Amelia Earhart, Wiley Post and George Herbert Wilkins. So it is no wonder that most people think of airplanes when they hear the name of Lockheed.
Today, they are a multinational aerospace manufacturer, global security and advanced technology company. I would imagine that even handle things like air cargo security. They probably even handle advanced air cargo handling systems.
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Metal Detectors
A retailer in the security industry needs to have an expansive product portfolio and professional, knowledgeable consultants that will help you find the perfect security solution for your needs. There systems should be in use at airports, government and corporate buildings, correctional and prison facilities, postal facilities, military zones, sea ports and border crossings. The technologies utilized in the systems range from X-ray and Gamma-ray imaging to advanced threat identification techniques such as neutron and diffraction analysis with multi zone metal detector.
Health Security
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14 Nov
Cited: MSNBC
The future of electronics and software is that it could very well be able to detect a variety of diseases more accurately than a doctor. To a doctor, a broken bone one day, and detection a few months later and then depression year after that could possibly appear to be separate medical issues. However, some Boston doctors had developed a new artificial intelligence program that tells them all of these symptoms are that of domestic abuse. In fact, this AI program can detect abuse victims 6 years before they would otherwise be found, which means it could eventually be used to diagnose just about any disease or injury.
“It’s very difficult to detect domestic abuse because it often happens in the privacy of the home,” said Ben Reis, a doctor at Children’s Hospital Boston (CHB) who helped develop the program.
“Doctors are often on the front lines of detecting abuse, but so often the doctor is focused on treating the injury, they don’t see the context behind it.”
Dozens of studies over the last 40 years have correlated various illnesses, injuries and other conditions with abuse. Bruising to the middle of the forearm or the core of the body instead of the elbow or knee can signal abuse. Depression or alcoholism may also be symptoms of this condition.
The new program takes all of these studies and puts them in one place. Before a doctor even consults with a patient, the software will alert the doctor about the likelihood of abuse in a particular case using a color-coded system. It would then be up to the doctor whether to treat the patient as a victim of abuse.
To create the artificial intelligence program, the CHB doctors used six years of data from more than 560,000 patients ages 18 years and older. While many studies have correlated certain injuries with abuse, Reis, along with his colleagues Isaac Kohane and Kenneth Mandi, tasked the program with finding its own connections between an abuse diagnosis and records of injuries leading up to that diagnosis.
The program picked up domestic abuse an average of two years before it was diagnosed. In one case, the program detected abuse more than six years before it was diagnosed by a physician. Robert Sege, a doctor at the Boston Medical Center not involved with the study, is very impressed with the research.
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“By the time someone is identified as abused, the abuse has generally gone on for a long time,” said Sege. “This is really powerful. If I had this with particular patients, I would be aware of the possibility and ask them more detailed questions or tell them about the kinds of services we provide.”
Electronic health records are the lynchpin of the artificial intelligence system, according to both Reis and Sege. Abuse victims often seek medical treatment at different locations for each injury to avoid detection. Each hospital or doctor keeps separate patient records but often fail to share those records. Keeping one, consolidated electronic record of a patient activity would enable the software to detect abuse.
The record doesn’t even have to be particularly detailed, says Reis. The CHB doctors used only the most basic patient data, “the lowest common denominator,” as Reis calls it, to diagnose abuse in patients. Using better data should only increase the program’s success at abuse detection.
Better data could also allow the program to diagnose a variety of diseases more accurately as well. Ultimately, Reis and his colleagues want to expand their software to consider every human disease, a project he likens to the Human Genome Project, a multinational, $3 billion effort to sequence the entire human genome. To support their research Reis was recently granted a four-year, $1.3 million grant to expand their research.
“We want to do a fundamental analysis of the entire human ‘disease-some’ — if there is such a word — to check the predictability of all diseases,” said Reis.
Some doctors may actually worry that they will be losing their jobs when an artificial intelligence system that is capable of diagnosing a host of diseases is created. However, they do not need to fear because it will take years to finish a complete analysis of all diseases and even after the project is complete, doctors will still be needed.
“We are here to empower doctors,” said Reis, “not replace them.”
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My Take: This is absolutely amazing! Doctors can use all the help they can get in making accurate diagnoses. In fact, I think we need more doctors and nurses because you keep hearing how overworked they are. Nobody wants a tired doctor trying to diagnose their condition in an emergency.
The EHR will make this an even better program once it is put into action. The lives that will be saved and changed because abuse is diagnosed earlier will be amazing. People will not have to rely on a Brooklyn nursing home abuse lawyer because it was detected early enough to stop it. However, they may still need to contact the NYC slip and fall accident attorney if they slip the grocery store.
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Open Mouth, Insert Foot
Sometimes things get out of hand and words are said or things are done in the heat of the moment. Having competent representation for Toronto provincial offences can keep you out of jail. A charge for assault or uttering threats is often treated very seriously, even if your charge is first time offence. In some cases, you may be kept in jail until released on bail. In those situations you often have to abide by strict conditions. This is treated much more seriously than other summary conviction offences because of the nature of the charge. Comparatively, an impaired driving charge often poses only the risk to human safety, and a theft or fraud deals with property. However, an assault or threatening charge is considered to relate directly to the safety of other people and as a result will be treated as such and you will need an Ottawa assault lawyer.
Medicare Supplement Plans
Medicare supplement insurance is an insurance policy that actually does exactly as it sounds. It supplements Medicare. This sounds easy enough, but why would you need a Medicare Supplement? When you turn 65 you become eligible for Medicare Supplemental Insurance that can help pay what Medicare Part A and Medicare Part B does not. Although these “Parts” of Medicare will cover a portion of your medical bills, there are still out-of-pocket expenses that you are responsible for. These expenses are called the “gaps” in Medicare. This is why Medicare sometimes calls insurance supplements a “Medigap” policy.
14 Nov
Cited: InformationWeek
For the first time in the US, Rhode Island state public health officials are electronically monitoring H1N1 flu outbreaks by using electronic data acquired from pharmacies. They are doing this based on each prescription data connected with the dispensing of chemical and three other antiviral drugs that are used, not only for seasonal flu, but for swine flu as well.
All, 100%, of the approximately 183 pharmacies in Rhode Island are currently connected into an e-prescription network provided by Surescripts, which along with the pharmacies will be providing public health officials with the flu drug data weekly.
The data will include prescriptions ordered by doctors electronically, or by paper, fax, or phone from independent drugstores as well as those operated by large retail chains such as CVS, Rite Aid, Walgreens, and Stop & Shop.
Public health officials will receive de-identified (no names) prescription data along with ZIP codes and ages of patients to aid in the tracking and trending of flu outbreaks through the state. The system uses a computer program that complements another flu tracking system used by state officials. That system includes data from Sentinel, which collects flu data reported by 25 doctor practices located in various geographic regions of the state, and another state system that collects data from hospital emergency departments.
By tracking data from multiple sources, public health officials will get a more comprehensive look at developing trends, such as identifying possible H1N1 outbreaks based on location or patient age, such as clusters of school age children in specific towns.
By using the e-prescription data along with Sentinel and ER data, state health officials can also detect and monitor discrepancies between outbreaks reported by doctors versus outbreaks suggested by the number of flu related drugs being prescribed. The discrepancies could be due to factors such as the over-prescription of flu medicines in absence of actual flu cases, as well as the under-reporting of flu by doctors in a region.
For instance, if state public health officials determine that doctors within a certain zip code are prescribing a usually large number of antiviral medicines in the absence of reported flu cases, state officials could target outreach and educational programs to healthcare providers in those regions. The system can also give public health officials notice if supplies of Tamiflu and other antiviral medicine are running low, which could trigger the state to release emergency stockpiles.
According to a Surescript spokesman, wrote Island has the highest percentage of pharmacies in the national e-prescribing network. Because of the statewide collaboration of healthcare providers, consumers, government leaders and leaders in academia working to improve healthcare, Rhode Island is showing the nation how to work together, improve on and handle situations like swine flu outbreaks.
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My Take: You mean that government officials actually thought of a new way to keep track of something like this? Wow, Rhode Island must have some really intelligent people in their government. Maybe they could loan them out to some of the other states or even the federal government. Sometimes I wonder if these people “in charge” of our government have any brains.
I am sure that those that are working on the health care bill in Washington do not have anyone brains. Last I heard they had one that was going to be great and would pay for itself by reducing coverage in Medicare and other areas. What is strange about this? Medicare is health coverage for the elderly and disabled. That means they are going to reduce coverage for senior citizens and disabled people and give everybody else better coverage. I think this is defeating the purpose of good health care for all.
That is like accreditation for medical students, doctors and healthcare facilities. Each area of the country has its own standards as well as federal and international standards. A DME accreditation certificate in one state is different from another because of their “standards”. It seems to me that they need to get healthcare accreditation solutions that cover each and every medical student, doctor, nurse and healthcare facility that are the same.
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Hair Replacement
Hair loss may be due to a number of reasons including genetic, hormonal, aging, trauma, infection, medications, and systemic illnesses as well as recent major surgeries affecting one’s immune system. Regardless of the cause, the end result of losing hair and getting bald may be devastating and you should contact a Panama City Florida plastic surgeon. With the recent advances in hair restoration techniques, particularly with the introduction of follicular unit hair transplants, the hair loss problem can be addressed in a much more effective way with more natural results with a Tallahassee hair loss surgeon.
Medical Equipment Resource
There are a couple of new devices that all doctors should utilize to help their patients of all ages to retain your hearing. One is the new Amplitude T-Series models are an entirely new concept in audiometry. The first thing you will probably notice about the Amplitude T-Series models is that there’s no box. That’s because the audiometer is built right into the patient response switch. The other will detect hearing loss, prevent language disabilities, and improve patient outcomes with the Welch Allyn OAE Hearing Screener, the child-friendly hearing screener set that’s objective, accurate, and easy to use.
Clean Home, Healthy Home
When it comes to maid service you will not find a more dedicated team of professionals for Maryland house cleaning, each of whom are carefully vetted before becoming certified maids. Whether you are searching for quality home cleaning support for residential property, move in or move out cleaning services for the commercial markets, or monthly apartment cleaning for your city dwelling, this team is ready to serve you. They offer professional carpet cleaning, kitchen cleaning and bathroom cleaning with unparalleled Bethesda home cleaning services to clean your entire home.
