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For the millions of U.S veterans living in rural areas, quick and efficient access to healthcare information can be hard to come by. With the power of the Web, however, things are getting easier.

WellFlorida’s Kendra Siler-Marsiglio, Ph.D., spoke at HRSA’s Health Information and Quality Webinar on Friday, June 20, 2014. Kendra, who heads the CommunityHealth IT program, discussed MyHealthStory, a Web-based tool that allows veterans to share their health information from the Veterans Health Administration (VA) with their other healthcare providers.

CommunityHealth IT is one of […]

Infographic created by Business Report, North Central Florida based on information from the “County Health Rankings & Roadmaps” program, a collaboration between the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, and WellFlorida Council, Inc. Read the full article and infographic online.

WellFlorida is conducting Community Health Improvement Plans (CHIP) for Bradford, Columbia, Hamilton, Hernando and Union Counties, which will be released at the end of June 2014.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Public Health Accreditation Board defines a community health improvement plan as a long-term, systematic effort to address public health problems on the basis of the results of community health assessment activities and the community health improvement process. This plan is used by health and other governmental education and human service agencies, in collaboration […]

WellFlorida is reaching its goals for the High Impact Prevention (HIP) project. HIP aims to decrease the spread of HIV and link HIV-infected individuals to services. The program, which is funded by the Florida Department of Health, began in January 2013 and has expanded from three counties to five—now covering Alachua, Columbia, Lake, Marion and Putnam.

HIP has three components: Everyone’s Doing It, It’s Everyone’s Business and ARTAS.

Everyone’s Doing It provides outreach services,

Perhaps the most frightening aspects of Big Tobacco, besides the well-documented effects of nicotine addiction, are its emerging tobacco products. At the 6th Annual Rural Tobacco Summit, Barry Hummel, Jr., MD, presented tobacco marketing tactics and product lines that are targeted toward youth.

“Tobacco is a gateway drug and a gateway behavior,” said Hummel, co-founder of the Quit Doc Research and Education Foundation. “[Tobacco] is the first drug that teens can access easily. The tobacco industry knows this, and deliberately targets youth with products and marketing.”

Flavored […]

MyHealthStory, the community-level Health Information Exchange supported by WellFlorida, helps healthcare professionals engage patients and satisfy Meaningful Use Stage 2 secure messaging and patient engagement measures. All across the nation, the federal government will be requiring that healthcare professionals have at least 5% of their patients accessing their medical records electronically. This may seem like a doable number; however, most healthcare professionals are finding it difficult to reach that goal. Why? For one, patients have a time memorizing all the different passcodes and processes to […]

Cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes are all diseases with known links to smoking cigarettes. Smoking can also greatly inhibit the surgical treatment of these conditions, as discussed by Matthew S. Ellis, MD, at the 6th Annual Rural Tobacco Summit on “Addiction: Tobacco & E-Cigarettes.”

Surgical treatment involves a wound healing process that normally includes inflammation, repair and remodeling, said Ellis, medical director for Wound Care and Hyperbarics at North Florida Regional Medical Center. When tobacco smoke is present in the environment, however, this process can be […]

E-cigarettes have been marketed for less than a decade, first prevalent in Japan in 2004 and later exported to the U.S. and Europe. Due to the product’s novelty, little information on its components, usage and effects are readily available from trustworthy sources. Kathy Nichols presented her research on “What We Know and Don’t Know” about e-cigarettes at the 6th Annual Rural Tobacco Summit on “Addiction: Tobacco & E-Cigarettes.”

E-cigarettes are marketed as electronic nicotine delivery systems/devices (ENDS/ENDDS), electronic cigarettes and personal vaporizers. Its users also commonly […]

The effects of tobacco addiction are inherently different on the adolescent brain as compared to adults. This was the focus of the presentation by Daniel Logan, MD, at the 6th Annual Rural Tobacco Summit on “Addiction: Tobacco & E-Cigarettes.” Logan, an assistant professor at the University of Florida Department of Psychiatry, discussed distinctive mental characteristics of teenage smokers.

The adolescent brain is maturing until about the age of 25. During this time, long-term connections and mental processes are being strengthened. When a teenager consumes tobacco there […]