City officials tap tech community to help solve public health problems (Baltimore Sun)

Friday Mar 3rd, 2017

Can technology solve public health problems? City leaders think so.

At the behest of the Baltimore city health department, teams of entrepreneurs have come up with seven ways that the city could use technology to address challenges in improving public health.

The teams are comprised of students, engineers, software developers and designers that collaborated with local tech incubators to develop apps, websites or other means to tackle specific problems. They include stemming opioid overdoses, preventing infant deaths, providing resources to ex-offenders, tracking asthma or providing some other solution that the city officials would have difficulty producing on their own.

The teams have been working for the past three months and plan to present their projects to the city, and business and tech communities Thursday evening, and could end up with small city grants of $5,000 to $25,000 or other aid to complete their projects and get them up and running. The city would retain a license to use the technology but would have no ownership stake.

All the new products are expected to be used in Baltimore in some way, and some could be developed into commercial products sold to other public health departments or entities, said Mike Fried, chief information officer for the city health department.

Read entire story.

Related Stories

Lead poisoning cases fell 19 percent in Baltimore last year, even as more children tested for exposure (Baltimore Sun)

The number of Baltimore children with lead poisoning fell 19 percent in 2017, even as more children were tested for exposure to the powerful neurotoxin.

Statewide, the number of Maryland children found to have elevated levels of lead in their blood held steady even as the number of children tested increased by 10 percent, according to a Maryland Department of the Environment report released Tuesday.

Read the entire story.

Azar Unveils Plan to Help Pregnant Patients Quit Opioids (MedPage Today)

States will get help from the federal government integrating services for pregnant and postpartum Medicaid patients with opioid use disorder under a pilot program announced Tuesday by Health and Hu

Trump declared an emergency over opioids. A new report finds it led to very little. (Vox)

To much fanfare last year, President Donald Trump ordered his administration to declare a public health emergency over the opioid epidemic. “As Americans, we cannot allow this to continue,” Trump said at the time. “It is time to liberate our communities from this scourge of drug addiction.”

When I’ve asked experts about these approaches, it’s not that any of them are bad. It’s that they fall short. For instance, Leana Wen, the former health commissioner of Baltimore (and soon-to-be president of Planned Parenthood), said that the Support for Patients and Communities Act “is simply tinkering around the edges.”

Read the entire story.

Visit the Newsroom