American Heart Association Precision Medicine Platform.

Integrating the open science movement with impactful discoveries in science, velocity of technology, and raw power of cloud computing has led to an unprecedented opportunity for scientific discovery. The American Heart Association recently established the Precision Medicine Platform through the efforts of multiple American Heart Association volunteers and a collaboration with Amazon Web Services. The cloud-based platform, powered by Amazon Web Services and available at https://precision.

Longer procedural times are independently associated with symptomatic intracranial hemorrhage in patients with large vessel occlusion stroke undergoing thrombectomy.

Background: Time to reperfusion is an essential factor in determination of outcomes in acute ischemic stroke (AIS).

Objective: To establish the effect of the procedural time on the clinical outcomes of patients with AIS.

Methods: Data from all consecutive patients who underwent mechanical thrombectomy between September 2010 and July 2012 were analysed retrospectively.

OpenFDA: an innovative platform providing access to a wealth of FDA's publicly available data.

Objective: The objective of openFDA is to facilitate access and use of big important Food and Drug Administration public datasets by developers, researchers, and the public through harmonization of data across disparate FDA datasets provided via application programming interfaces (APIs).

Materials And Methods: Using cutting-edge technologies deployed on FDA's new public cloud computing infrastructure, openFDA provides open data for easier, faster (over 300 requests per second per process), and better access to FDA datasets; open source code and documentation shared on GitHub for open community contributions of examples, apps and ideas; and infrastructure that can be adopted for other public health big data challenges.

Results: Since its launch on June 2, 2014, openFDA has developed four APIs for drug and device adverse events, recall information for all FDA-regulated products, and drug labeling.

Social media in public health.

Introduction Or Background: While social media interactions are currently not fully understood, as individual health behaviors and outcomes are shared online, social media offers an increasingly clear picture of the dynamics of these processes.

Sources Of Data: Social media is becoming an increasingly common platform among clinicians and public health officials to share information with the public, track or predict diseases.

Areas Of Agreement: Social media can be used for engaging the public and communicating key public health interventions, while providing an important tool for public health surveillance.

Application of change point analysis to daily influenza-like illness emergency department visits.

Background: The utility of healthcare utilization data from US emergency departments (EDs) for rapid monitoring of changes in influenza-like illness (ILI) activity was highlighted during the recent influenza A (H1N1) pandemic. Monitoring has tended to rely on detection algorithms, such as the Early Aberration Reporting System (EARS), which are limited in their ability to detect subtle changes and identify disease trends.

Objective: To evaluate a complementary approach, change point analysis (CPA), for detecting changes in the incidence of ED visits due to ILI.

Self-reported fever and measured temperature in emergency department records used for syndromic surveillance.

Many public health agencies monitor population health using syndromic surveillance, generally employing information from emergency department (ED) visit records. When combined with other information, objective evidence of fever may enhance the accuracy with which surveillance systems detect syndromes of interest, such as influenza-like illness. This study found that patient chief complaint of self-reported fever was more readily available in ED records than measured temperature and that the majority of patients with an elevated temperature recorded also self-reported fever.

Transportation barriers to accessing health care for urban children.

The Texas Children's Hospital Residents' Primary Care Group Clinic provides primary care to urban low-income children. The objective of this cross-sectional study was to investigate the impact of transportation problems on a family's ability to keep an appointment. One hundred eighty-three caregivers of children with an appointment were interviewed.

NHIN, RHIOs, and Public Health.

Public health plays a critical role in forming the building blocks for community or regional health-information sharing, which is essential to the long-term viability of a Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) and the Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIOs). By contributing to its visions, policies, processes, standards, and needs/requirements, public health will close the loop within an NHIN and the RHIOs environment. In this article we illustrate public health's essential role in an NHIN and the RHIOs by examining the mutual benefits to healthcare and public health.