NOAA’s Weather-Ready Nation website (with social media links)

From the NOAA About Page (US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)

NOAA’s Weather-Ready Nation is about building community resilience in the face of increasing vulnerability to extreme weather and water events.

Record-breaking snowfall, cold temperatures, extended drought, high heat, severe flooding, violent tornadoes, and massive hurricanes have all combined to reach the greatest number of multi-billion dollar weather disasters in the nation’s history.

The devastating impacts of extreme events can be reduced through improved readiness, which is why the Weather-Ready Nation initiative is so important. Through operational initiatives, NOAA’s National Weather Service is transforming its operations to help America respond. In the end, emergency managers, first responders, government officials, businesses and the public will be empowered to make fast, smart decisions to save lives and livelihoods.

The initiative includes improvements in a wide range of areas to support management of the nation’s water supply, understanding of climate-related risks, economic productivity, healthy communities and ecosystems.

How to receive (and give) information to NOAA/National Weather Service  and NOAA/NWS news followers

WRN Social Media

 NOAA Youtube
 NOAA’s Facebook
 NOAA Twitter Feed

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 NWS Facebook
 NWS Youtube
 NWS Twitter Feed

Additionally, the National Weather Service has a news feed one can subscribe to

AHRQ’s Health Care Innovations Exchange Focuses on Clinical-Community Linkages to Improve Chronic Disease Car

AHRQ’s Health Care Innovations Exchange Focuses on Clinical-Community Linkages to Improve Chronic Disease Care

From a recent email update rec’d from AHRQ (US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality)

The July 3 issue of AHRQ’s Health Care Innovations Exchange features two profiles of partnerships between clinical practices and community organizations that leverage health provider teams and lay health advisors to improve the management of chronic diseases. One profile describes a public-private initiative that worked with community health teams to improve the delivery of preventive, health maintenance, and chronic care services in Vermont. The pilot program included incentive payments to providers who met National Committee for Quality Assurance-determined care standards, access to an insurer-funded team of community-based health providers, health information incorporated into a Web-based clinical tracking system, and interfaces with other State care coordination initiatives. Over a 4-year period, the pilot program experienced a 6 percent decrease in inpatient admissions and a 10 percent decrease in emergency department visits among participating practices. Select to read more profiles related to clinical-community linkages, including innovations and tools, on the Health Care Innovations Exchange Web site, which contains more than 700 searchable innovations and 1,500 QualityTools.

Related articles

• AHRQ Implementation Toolsets for E-Prescribing (medicineandtechnology.com)
• 11 Chronic Disease Technologies to Watch (thielst.typepad.com)
• Involving eHealth: How Health Care Leaders May Envelop Chronic Care Management Strategies with Health Information Exchange Directives (silverevolution.wordpress.com)
• Tools Help Foster Communication Between Patients and Clinicians (thielst.typepad.com)

Drug Side Effects Successfully Predicted By Computer Model (with Fast Stats on Drug Failure Rates)

Cost efficient way to develop safer compounds

 From the 13 June 2012 Medical News Today article

A new set of computer models has successfully predicted negative side effects in hundreds of current drugs, based on the similarity between their chemical structures and those molecules known to cause side effects, according to a paper appearing online this week in the journal Nature. …

Drugs frequently interact with more than one target, with hundreds of these targets linked to the side effects of clinically used therapeutics. Focusing on 656 drugs that are currently prescribed, with known safety records or side effects, the team was able to predict such undesirable targets – and thus potential side effects – half of the time.

That’s a significant leap forward from previous work, which has never tackled hundreds of compounds at once, according to Brian Shoichet, PhD, a UCSF professor of pharmaceutical chemistry who was the joint advisor on the project alongside Laszlo Urban, MD, PhD, at Novartis.

As a result, it offers a possible new way for researchers to focus their efforts on developing the compounds that will be safest for patients, while potentially saving billions of dollars each year that goes into studying and developing drugs that fail. …

…

Drug Failure Rates

• Estimated cost of bringing a drug to market: $1.2 billion
• Only one in 5,000 drug candidates that enter preclinical testing ever reaches the market
• For every five drugs that start clinical trials, only one succeeds
• Of the 4,300 companies engaged in drug innovation, only 6% (261) have registered a new drug since 1950.
• Worldwide, the pharmaceutical industry spends $50 Billion per year on R&D, but produces only 21 new drugs per year (2008)
  

  A Side Effect of Vicodin (Photo credit: thehoneybunny)

Related articles

• Computer Model Successfully Predicts Drug Side Effects (InnovationToronto.com)
• The cost of Pharma R&D failure (scienceintelligence.wordpress.com)
• Computer model successfully predicts drug side effects (eurekalert.org)
• Assessing Drug Target Association Using Semantic Linked Data (ploscompbiol.org)
• Novartis predicts drug side effects with computers (fiercebiotechit.com)
• Side Effects of Cholesterol-Lowering Treatments (everydayhealth.com)
• Infographic: A Chart That Helps Predict Drug Side Effects (fastcodesign.com)