Medical care
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Although vulnerable populations may benefit from in-home health information technologies (HIT) that promote disease self-management, there is a "digital divide" in which these groups are often unlikely to use such programs. We describe the early phases of applying and testing an existing Veterans Affairs (VA) HIT-care management program, Care Coordination Home Telehealth (CCHT), to recently homeless Veterans in the US Department of Housing and Urban Development-VA Supportive Housing (HUD-VASH) program. Peers were used to support patient participation. ⋯ HIT tools hold promise for in-home care management for recently housed Veterans. Patient-level barriers to enrollment must be addressed in the next steps of quality improvement, testing and evaluating peer-driven CCHT recruitment.
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Understanding how hospitals functioned during the 2009 influenza A(H1N1)pdm09 pandemic may improve future public health emergency response, but information about its impact on US hospitals remains largely unknown. ⋯ The fall 2009 pandemic period substantially impacted US hospitals, mostly through increased ED visits. For a small proportion of hospitals that experienced a high surge in inpatient admissions, increased mortality from selected clinical conditions was associated with both prepandemic outcomes and surge, highlighting the linkage between daily hospital operations and disaster preparedness.