The enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a signal achievement on the road to reform, which arguably began with the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. That statute's Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) provisions created an essential foundation for restructuring health care delivery and for achieving the ke...

In 2007 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a Request for Proposal for the "Situational Awareness through Health Information Exchange" project. The Situational Awareness project's goals are to connect public health with health information exchanges (HIEs) to improve public health's real-time understanding of communities' population health and healthcare facility status. ...

Edi tor ’s Note : As part of our continuing effort to highlight innovative approaches and tools to improve the health and environment of communities, the Journal is pleased to publish a bimonthly column from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) Environmental Public Health Tracking Network (Tracking Network). The Tracking Network is a system of integrated health, exposure, an...

BACKGROUND The Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) collects nationally representative data about the American's public use of health-related information. This survey is available in English and Spanish, but not in American Sign Language (ASL). Thus, the exclusion of ASL users from these national health information survey studies has led to a significant gap in knowledge of Interne...

INTRODUCTION One Health (OH) can be considered a complex emerging policy to resolve health issues at the animal-human and environmental interface. It is expected to drive system changes in terms of new formal and informal institutional and organisational arrangements. This study, using Rift Valley fever (RVF) as a zoonotic problem requiring an OH approach, sought to understand the institutional...

increasing urban network has both positive (accessibility) and negative (air pollution) impacts. in this research air quality is chosen as key elements with respect to their critical roles in quality of life and urban health. the overall objective of this study is to develop a mathematical model to plan appropriate locations for residential land uses and urban transportation network development...

The National Health Information Network (NHIN) is a federal mandate of the US Government. It involves setting the standards for interoperability and effective information technology in health care for hospitals, urgent care, private practices, insurance carriers, and other health care participants. Much attention has been paid to mixed NHIN funding outcomes of Regional Health Information Organi...

In this paper, we describe and evaluate a new distributed architecture for clinical decision support called SANDS (Service-oriented Architecture for NHIN Decision Support), which leverages current health information exchange efforts and is based on the principles of a service-oriented architecture. The architecture allows disparate clinical information systems and clinical decision support syst...

introduction: information technology might have some potential effects, such as influencing treatment process, rate and easiness of information retrieval, and information availability for making clinical decisions based on conditions and management, educational and research activities on health service systems. recognizing these effects can be concerned as a foundation to strategic planning in ...