Lafayette Parish public school students could soon be on their way to having their own personal electronic health records following a Monday morning unveiling of the vision for Lafayette’s “Living Lab for Health Innovation.”
UL Lafayette officials, along with LCG, LUS Fiber and the nonprofit FiberCorps members laying the Living Lab groundwork, revealed Monday the role Lafayette plans to play in the US Ignite effort through the creation of Lafayette’s “Living Lab for Health Innovation.”
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| Louisiana DHH Secretary Bruce Greenstein was in Lafayette Monday to help celebrate and explain the city's new role as a "Living Lab for Health Innovation." |
Lafayette was among the 25 cities across the country chosen in June to hop on the US Ignite bandwidth wagon, an effort to bring national focus to next-generation technologies in six areas of “national priority.” The designation for the Hub City came during a formal announcement and US Ignite kickoff event held at the White House.
The US Ignite initiative will center its efforts on using high-speed technology applications to better services in the following areas of public interest: advanced manufacturing, health IT, transportation, education and workforce development, clean energy, and emergency preparedness and public safety.
Lafayette’s focus will be the creation of a “Living Lab for Health Innovation,” making Lafayette a “community-scale test bed for health care innovators to test their ideas in real-world settings .... defining, designing and developing solutions to the many challenges facing health care today.”
The Living Lab will focus on two projects in coming months that intertwine technology and the health care sector. The first is working with Microsoft and its HealthVault technology to bring personal electronic health records to each student. According to a Living Lab release, “parents who opt-in will, for example, be able to manage and share their kids’ immunization records with the school, without having to bring copies at the beginning of each school year.”
The second iniative, Aging in Place, will use tele-medicine, tele-health technologies to help the health care industry accommodate the influx of baby boomers in need of services. Using LUSFiber, those health services could be virtually placed in the homes of ageing patients:
“The Living Lab is a place where the most innovative and transformational solutions are created, piloted, verified, validated and documented, and disseminated,” said Dr. Ramesh Kolluru, Director, Center for Business and Information Technologies and Site Director for the NSF Center for Visual and Decision Informatics. “If your solution works in Lafayette, and we can prove that it is scalable to the State of Louisiana, you now have a blueprint to take your ideas nationwide.” He added, “We seek to catalyze initiatives in digital health, tele-medicine and tele-health technologies, and advanced healthcare analytics.
The Living Lab is interested in recruiting the best minds, entrepreneurs and companies from across the globe, while developing the next-generation technology innovations and knowledge-economy workforce for the health industry.
For more information on the Living Lab and its initiatives, contact CBIT Director Kolluru at 482-0611.
MAY 17 Here's a column from James Gill, this time in the Advocate. Gill, who has jumped ship from the Picayune, writes about the absurdity of dueling polls in this post. The numbers are so wildly different, it is obvious that both sides are "cooking the books," he writes. In particular, he looks at Sen. Mary Landrieu, and how her recent actions in DC have been received by those polled. Gill's acerbic, amusing prose is a welcome addition to a paper so conservative as to be occasionally lacking in personality.
MAY 17 Blogger Tom Aswell continues delivering bombshells about the state education department and Gov. Jindal's education "reform" efforts. In this post, he reports that students in the Shreveport area have been signed up for a charter school without their knowledge or consent. Most interesting to Aswell is how this Texas-based charter (with ties to GOP types) got the personal student information it has, if the students didn't give it.
MAY 17 This post by JR Ball in the Baton Rouge Business Report is an interesting tongue-in-cheek look at recent Baton Rouge economic development efforts. Among the items he examines is the idea that gaining a Costco makes BR a "world-class city." (Really? All you need is a different brand of Sam's? MK!) This effort, and other recent ones, are all built on the taxpayer's back, with tax zones, tax incentives and tax rebates, Ball writes.
MAY 17 Blogger CB Forgotston is critical of the legislature's reliance on a revenue-estimating committee's decision to include projected tax amnesty income in this year's forecast. That's a problem, CB posts, because the deadline for these people to pay their taxes is June 30, 2014. So when do you think these people who haven't paid taxes in years are going to pay their taxes? Surely not before June 30, and that means the money won't be there for this year's budget, he argues.
MAY 17 Here's an interesting blog out of California by a Hollywood writer, attorney and academic named Brian Alan Lane. He blogs about higher ed, and was a whistle-blower in a scandal over false credentials. In this post, he takes aim at LSU's new top dog, King Alexander. It's convoluted and a little confusing, but it sure makes Alexander a lot more interesting than he was yesterday.
MAY 17 Blogger Robert Mann writes about the LSU Board's refusal to allow Dr. Fred Cerise to testify before the legislature about Gov. Jindal's plan to close down all the state's charity hospitals and dump the poor on the private system. It's hard to imagine anyone more qualified than Cerise to testify about that, so why would anyone try to prevent him doing so? Mann thinks it is because the powers that be aren't interested in hearing any truth about the plan.
MAY 17 This post on the Louisiana Sinkhole Bugle, a blog that notes developments in the Bayou Corne and Jefferson Island salt domes, talks about a proposed expansion of the salt dome storage under Lake Peigneur in Iberia Parish. Residents are working against it for several reasons, including two biggies: the sinkhole disaster in Bayou Corne and the continuing, unexplained bubbling on the surface of the Lake.
MAY 17 NOLA police arrested more people Thursday accused of either being involved in the Mother's Day shooting or hiding the suspect afterward, this Gambit story reports. The NOLA police chief said he suspects the whole thing was gang-related and throws out a challenge to the gangs: he's got informants now, he says, and he knows a lot more than the gangs want him to know. The people who live in the neighborhoods terrorized by gangs are ready to talk, he says.
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