HLN Consulting, LLC – Innovators in Public Health Informatics

Ready or Not: New Report on Protecting the Public’s Health

by Noam Arzton May 5, 2019

The Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) released its 2019 edition of what it hopes will be an annual report, Ready or Not: Protecting the Public’s Health from Diseases, Disasters and Bioterrorism last February. The ground-breaking report warns about key global challenges ahead, like the risk of a flu pandemic; the impact of weather pattern changes due to climate change; the dangers of antimicrobial resistance, and others, and tries to offer advice on how to prepare for them.

In Section 1 of the report, titled Health Threats: A Review of 2018, the authors review a litany of disease outbreaks, and severe weather and natural disaster events. They note the incidents, actions, and corresponding research findings, meetings, and events related to each. On the policy front, they note the September 2018 release by the White House of its National Biodefense Strategy (see earlier article on this topic). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released another report, Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Capabilities, in October 2018 (updated in January 2019). This section of the TFAH report also reviews the various activities of the Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense.

ONC Gets It Mostly Right with TEFCA 2.0 [Updated]

by Noam Arzton April 24, 2019

On April 17, 2019 the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) released the second draft of its Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) for comment. The initial version was released more than a year ago in January 2018 (see my original blog). As before, this is in response to a requirement imposed by Congress in the 21^st Century Cures Act. After a somewhat lengthy (but well written) introduction, the document contains three parts (compared to just two parts the first time around):

HLN Participates in 2019 California Immunization Coalition Summit

by Noam Arzton April 10, 2019

HLN participated in the 2019 California Immunization Coalition Summit held on April 8-9. 2019 in Riverside, CA. For over twelve years, the CIC Summit has brought together partners and colleagues from throughout California and beyond to share ideas, highlight successes, and identify partnerships.

This year HLN’s president, Dr. Noam Arzt, delivered two talks during breakout sessions at the summit:

Several hundred stakeholders from around California attended this important event.

Public Health Organizations Implore Congress to Fund Public Health Surveillance Systems

by Noam Arzton March 25, 2019

HLN joined more than eighty organizations, institutions and companies in imploring Congress to fund public health surveillance systems. The appropriations request letters – one to the House and one to the Senate – is seeking $1 billion over ten years (and $100 million in FY 2020) for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to allow CDC, state, local, tribal, and territorial health departments to move from sluggish, manual, paper-based data collection to seamless, automated, interoperable IT systems and to recruit and retain skilled data scientists to use them.

HLN has been at the forefront of systems development in public health, and has long advocated for the modernization of public health registries and other systems. This initiative is focused on public health surveillance systems, and HLN’s work on the Reportable Condition Knowledge Management System (RCKMS) supports the electronic case reporting (eCR) initiative described in a flyer describing the details of this initiative published by a set of leading public health organizations.

HLN encourages everyone to advocate for these needed funds at every opportunity.

See Congressional testimony by Janet Hamilton of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE).

HLN Releases Update to its Award Winning Open Source Immunization Forecaster

by Noam Arzton March 11, 2019

On March 7, 2019, HLN released a new version (v1.16.1) of the Immunization Calculation Engine (ICE). ICE is a state-of-the-art open-source software system that provides clinical decision support for immunizations for use in Immunization Information Systems (IIS), Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Personal Health Record (PHR) Systems.

This version includes:

DTP Vaccine Group: Added an update to the “Six by Seven” rule to explicitly state that duplicate shots on the same day do not count towards this rule. The intention of this change is to prevent potentially “bad data” that may be passed into the ICE service from affecting the forecast result.
Hib Vaccine Group: Improved handling of duplicate shots administered on the same day. For details, please refer to the Two Shots, Same Vaccine Group, Same Day Exception Rules page.
Minor logic changes to the Meningococcal B, Polio, Rotavirus and Pneumococcal vaccine groups.

HLN recently demonstrated ICE integrated into two EHRs at the HIMSS19 Interoperability Showcase starting in February in Orlando, FL.

The full software release is available for download at https://cdsframework.atlassian.net/wiki/display/ICE/Downloads. A revised ICE Implementation Guide is also available.

See the feature article about ICE in Open Health News.