When it comes to electronic health records, “the switch to cloud is inevitable.” That’s according to Joy Pritts, Chief Privacy Officer at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT in the Obama administration, who spoke at a “Health Care, the Cloud, and Privacy” panel hosted by the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, Patient Privacy Rights.

Electronic health records are exactly what they sound like: A collection of health information in digital format that can include a wide range of data, from intimate details of your medical history and test results to demographic data to your billing information. Digital records are superior to physical ones because they can be transferred quickly when patients switch providers, help doctors get a complete picture of patient health, eliminate the need for redundant testing, and provide new opportunities for analyzing treatments for efficiency and effectiveness.

They are also supposed to be a cost saver. Some estimates have put the potential cost savings for switching over to electronic records as high as $81 billion annually, although the real world implementation hasn’t come close to hitting that target. Cloud storage and computing are part of this equation due to their potential to help make the transition to electronic health records more cost effective and unleash the analytics power of big data on health care information.

But while storing medical records digitally on the cloud may offer great promise for increasing the efficiency of the health care system, it is not without its challenges. Data security and privacy of health information are major obstacles where policy has not yet caught up with practice.

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Regardless of race, class, education level, and even healthy eating and exercise habits, Americans have a shorter life expectancy than their peers in other affluent nations. According to a new government-sponsored survey released Wednesday, part of the gap in life expectancy can be attributed to the fact that people living in the U.S. are much more likely to die from traffic accidents and homicides than the people in other well-off countries like Japan, Australia, Canada, and Germany.

That health gap has worsened over the past three decades, even as medical advances have improved modern health services. And Americans are falling behind in several categories, whether or not they’re afforded privileges that would suggest they might be healthier than their less advantaged peers:

The study listed nine health areas in which Americans came in below average: infant mortality and low birth weight, injuries and homicides, adolescent pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, HIV and AIDS, drug-related deaths, obesity and diabetes, heart disease, chronic lung disease and disability. [...]

“Even Americans who are white, insured, have college educations and seem to have healthy behaviors are in worse health than similar people in other nations,” said [Dr. Steven H. Woolf], a researcher who directs the Center for Human Needs at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Va.

The disparities were pervasive across all age groups up to 75, Woolf told the reporters, and seemed to stem from a variety of wide-ranging causes, including U.S. car culture, the number of uninsured people in the country, and weaknesses in our outpatient healthcare system.

“The pervasiveness of the problem was really staggering,” Woolf told Bloomberg News. “I don’t think American parents know their children will live a shorter life with greater disease rates than other countries.”

The United States spends more money on its health care system than any other developed nation, but other studies have confirmed that simply spending more money doesn’t guarantee better care. And many Americans may not even be able to access that care in the first place. Although Obamacare intends to extend health coverage to 30 million previously uninsured Americans by 2014, some Americans still struggle to be able to afford the care they need, particularly since the economic downturn during the Great Recession forced all Americans to cut back on medical services.

New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez (R) today announced that she will agree to expand Medicaid to extend coverage to additional low-income residents of her state, following a provision set forth in Obamacare.

Martinez is only the second Republican governor to join Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval (R) and agree to the Medicaid expansion. Other Republican governors have refused to expand the program, essentially acknowledging that they would rather allow low-income people in their state to go uninsured than to follow the law of their Democratic president.

The AP estimates that the expansion will help cover roughly 170,000 people in New Mexico:

Republican Gov. Susana Martinez says New Mexico will follow provisions of a federal health care law to expand the state’s Medicaid program to potentially provide medical services to 170,000 low-income adults.[...]

Martinez made the announcement Wednesday during a speech in Albuquerque.

About a fourth of New Mexico’s population currently receives health care through Medicaid, but the program mostly covers uninsured children in low-income families along with the disabled and some extremely low-income adults.

The expansion in 2014 will make adults eligible with incomes of about $26,000 for a family of three or $15,400 for an individual.

New Mexico has among the highest rates of uninsured in the country. The Medicaid expansion seeks to remedy this problem by permitting those within 133 percent of the federal poverty line to join the program, helping aide those who earn too much to qualify, but not enough to afford coverage.

The state also moved to set up its health insurance exchange earlier this month.

Twelve of the deans leading the nation’s top public health schools have written to President Barack Obama to condemn the use of public health programs as cover for covert activities.

In 2011, it was reported that the Central Intelligence Agency utilized a vaccination program as cover to confirm the whereabouts of Osama bin Ladin in Abottabad, Pakistan. Since then, health workers have been targeted for violence throughout the country, with over a dozen murdered in the past three weeks alone. The upswing in violence caused the United Nations to suspend their vaccine work in December, while the covert operation itself led the Pakistani government to kick out the NGO Save the Children in Sept. 2012.

In the course of the one-page letter, the deans or such schools as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and UCLA take the President and the administration to task for their role in the spreading mistrust of health workers, and close with an impassioned plea to prevent further uses of health programs for intelligence-gathering:

Independent of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, contaminating humanitarian and public health programs with covert activities threatens the present participants and future potential of much of what we undertake internationally to improve health and provide humanitarian assistance. As public health academic leaders, we hereby urge you to assure the public that this type of practice will not be repeated.

International public health work builds peace and is one of the most constructive means by which our past, present, and future public health students can pursue a life of fulfillment and service. Please do not allow that outlet of common good to be closed to them because of political and/or security interests that ignore the type of unintended negative public health impacts we are witnessing in Pakistan.

The letter specifically refers to a recent spike in treatable diseases run rampant in Pakistan, following the surge in suspicion towards vaccination programs and the workers who administer them. In particular, have measles have jumped from 4,000 in 2011 to 14,000 in 2012. Likewise, Pakistan is one of only three countries where polio remains endemic, a statistic that will be unlikely to change should attacks on health workers continue.

In a striking example of the intersection between America’s broken health care system and 21st century information technology, doctors and dentists are successfully luring younger Americans between the ages of 20 and 40 into purchasing online coupons for their health care needs, Kaiser Health News reports.

The coupons tend to attract younger patients looking for one-off services that don’t require much follow up. Tellingly, even though many of these Americans already possess private insurance, the online deals are more generous than their benefits:

Health and medical deals make up about 5 to 10 percent of the online coupon industry, according to Unaiz Kabani, data product manager at Yipit, a service that aggregates companies’ daily deals. Groupon, the market leader, had about 115 million subscribers in 2011, which he says are mostly 20- to 40-year-old college-educated women. Living Social says it has about 70 million members.

Health providers often see good results after an initial offer, but the patients who come in for treatment frequently don’t return.

“When you’re looking at a demographic that’s young, where some may have insurance, some many not, they’re more inclined to be episodic,” said James Doulgeris, a health care business and marketing strategist at HCP Associates.

He said coupons are often the cheapest option for healthy people who may not need follow-up appointments. Even for those enrolled in a private insurance plan, the cost of using an online deal or a retail clinic may be less than seeing an in-network physician.

ThinkProgress has previously reported on multiple instances of Americans resorting to desperate measures such as online “crowd funding” — in essence, cyber-begging — in order to pay for their medical care. This is as much a testament to the consumer-assisting potential of the Internet as it is an indictment of America’s increasingly costly health care system.

Although many of the Americans utilizing such deals are doing so out of convenience and don’t suffer from recurring or debilitating health problems, the fact that a fair number of them already have private insurance should serve as a warning sign regarding the pitfalls of inadequate coverage. And the problem only gets worse for those with more extensive medical needs. While Obamacare will assist Americans in purchasing private insurance through its federal subsidies, its “essential health benefits” do not encompass several common — and expensive — treatments such as vision care and dental care for adults.

There’s only one effective oral antibiotic treatment currently used to treat gonorrhea in North America — but that number might soon drop to zero, since researchers have identified the first cases of gonorrhea immune to the antibiotic.

A study released in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Tuesday found that nearly seven percent of the patients at a Toronto clinic remained infected with the disease even after a round of oral cephalosporins, the lone remaining oral antibiotic that can effectively treat the resistant strains of gonorrhea. This presents a potential long-term public health crisis for the United States, where gonorrhea is the second most common sexually transmitted disease with 321,849 cases reported in 2011. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) already issued guidance to physicians in August steering them away from oral cephalosporins as a first line treatment for gonorrhea, citing resistance risks.

According to the Australian School of Business, pharmaceutical companies’ greed presents one of the major roadblocks to developing better antibiotics:

Part of the problem is that the business case for developing an antibiotic — especially one for the percentage of people currently resistant to them — is extremely poor, according to Taylor, who tests patient samples and reports on antibiotic resistance. One of the first cases of a patient infected with an organism carrying New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase (a superbug) was reported from a Sydney hospital in collaboration with a French laboratory, Taylor notes.

Antibiotic resistance is becoming more common, but for pharmaceutical companies the “superbug” bacteria requiring treatment are less appealing targets for drug development than conditions that require long-term medication, such as statins (cholesterol-lowering drugs), anti-depressants, beta-blockers or anti-rheumatics, Taylor says.

That’s why gonorrhea is just one of the many diseases developing resistance to commonly used antibiotics as a result of misuse, including over-prescription by physicians and patients not taking their complete courses. For instance, the estimated number of hospital stays
involving methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections in the U.S. rose from 1,900 in 1993 to a staggering 368,000 in 2005 — yet, despite calls to action for the development of new antibiotics, only 83 of the more than 2,950 medicines under development in 2010 were antibiotics.

Pharmaceutical companies may have some more time before resistant strains of gonorrhea spread. But with a public health problem of this magnitude on the horizon, they may need to re-evaluate their position on antibiotic development soon.

GOP governors across the country are so resistant to implementing Obamacare, they’re unwilling to expand their Medicaid programs under the health reform law at the expense of the low-income residents in their states. And Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) actually wants to go even further — not only does he oppose expanding Medicaid to extend health care to additional poor Mainers, but he’s also seeking to contract the program to drop 37,000 low-income people who currently have Medicaid coverage.

But the Obama administration will prevent LePage from carrying out that plan. Federal officials rejected the governor’s proposal to drop coverage for nearly 15,000 parents with incomes that fall between the federal poverty level ($23,050 for a family of four) and 133 percent of the poverty level ($30,657 for a family of four), as well as an additional 6,000 19- and 20-year-olds whose incomes put them in that gap. Obamacare seeks to establish a new eligibility level for Medicaid at 133 percent of the poverty level, which will help eliminate the coverage gap that often prevents America’s working poor from being able to afford the health services they need.

Luckily for LePage and unluckily for Maine’s low-income residents, the governor will still be able to satisfy his desire to scale back his state’s Medicaid rolls to some extent. Maine used to extend coverage to low-income people whose incomes exceeded 133 percent of the poverty level, and the federal government acknowledged that Obamacare can’t stop LePage from dropping Maine’s Medicaid eligibility level down to that 133 percent threshold — a move that will purge about 20,000 Mainers from the Medicaid rolls at the beginning of March.

LePage has been open about his distaste for President Obama’s landmark health reform law, which seeks to ensure that over 30 million previously uninsured Americans have access to health care by 2014. Following Obama’s reelection, the governor asserted he wouldn’t “lift a finger” to meet impending deadlines to implement the Affordable Care Act because he believes the law represents “the degradation of our nation’s premier health care system.” The thousands of Maine residents set to lose their access to Medicaid coverage on March 1, however, may not share the same esteem for the United States’ current health care system.

In the wake of the mass shootings at a Connecticut elementary school in December, the American public began engaging in a national conversation about improving the U.S.’s mental health care system to prevent future tragedies. While improving Americans’ access to mental health services is important, some pro-gun advocates like the NRA have used America’s floundering health care system as a convenient scapegoat for violent crimes, despite the fact that people with mental health problems are not statistically inclined towards violence.

It’s true that poor Americans — who are disproportionately affected by mental disorders — shouldn’t struggle to access the mental health services they need, but the existing barriers to that type of health care is just one flaw in a mental health system that may have even bigger problems. New research published in the medical journal JAMA Psychiatry suggests that mental health treatments may not be effective until the U.S. reforms the way they are administered.

According to the study, even though 55 percent of suicidal teenagers had actually received some form of treatment for their depression, that alone was not enough to prevent them from attempting suicide in the absence of comprehensive medical procedures that take disparate mental health issues into account:

Previous studies have had similar findings, based on smaller, regional samples. But the new study is the first to suggest, in a large nationwide sample, that access to treatment does not make a big difference.

The study suggests that effective treatment for severely suicidal teenagers must address not just mood disorders, but also behavior problems that can lead to impulsive acts, experts said. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1,386 people between the ages of 13 and 18 committed suicide in 2010, the latest year for which numbers are available.

“I think one of the take-aways here is that treatment for depression may be necessary but not sufficient to prevent kids from attempting suicide,” said Dr. David Brent, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the study. “We simply do not have empirically validated treatments for recurrent suicidal behavior.”

The lack of holistic treatment to address all areas of mental health — rather than simply focusing on one part of the larger issue — isn’t unique to depression and suicidal teens. Americans with eating disorders often find themselves with spotty benefits and lack comprehensive care due to the complex, wide-ranging physical and mental manifestations of their sickness. Any effort to truly reform America’s mental health system must begin with a basic understanding of the various ways that a patient’s disorder might manifest itself, and how it relates to other aspects of the patient’s medical history.

In the aftermath of last month’s mass shooting in a Newtown, CT elementary school, the National Rifle Association claimed the only thing that will prevent future tragedies in schools is “a good guy with a gun.” Now, one Indiana lawmaker is expanding on that line of thought to claim that allowing college students to carry concealed weapons will protect women from sexual assault.

State Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) told the Associated Press that local members of Students for Concealed Carry, a national group that advocates for hidden guns on campuses, asked him to support the initiative as a method of protecting women on campus. “That’s what’s compelling about this issue, is how many female students there are around the state, who have very specific and real reasons to be afraid for their own safety on their campus,” Banks explained. “The number of sexual assault cases on campuses is alarming.”

While Banks is correct that college campuses still have a long way to go when it comes to addressing sexual assault and rape culture, he may want to reconsider his approach to those issues — especially since the educators and counselors who specialize in dealing with sexual violence on Indiana’s campuses haven’t been quick to lend their support to his measure. Two university officials told Indiana’s NPR affiliate that, due to the nature of most sexual crimes on college campuses, a concealed firearm likely wouldn’t be much actual help to the women attempting to defend themselves against rapists:

The premise is that armed students could better protect themselves from aggressors, including sexual abusers. But IU Sexual Assault Services Center counselor Debbie Melloan says a gun might offer less protection against rape than it would seem to.

“Most sexual assaults happen between people who know one another. You’re going to be in a close, kind of private setting…are you going to be willing to shoot the person that is your friend?”

IU-Bloomington Director of New Student Orientation Melanie Payne, speaking for herself and not the university, shares Melloan’s concern.

“They’re not picturing, you know, a nice, comfortable date that goes wrong, or a group party situation that goes wrong,” she said of students who might envision protecting themselves with a gun.

Indeed, an estimated two-thirds of sexual assaults occur between people who already know each other. And Melloan and Payne explained that the students who understand the situations that constitute sexual assault — that is, students who understand when their consent is being violated — are the students who have a better chance of protecting themselves against sexual assault. Increased education about rape culture on college campuses could actually be a more powerful tool than a gun.

In fact, conservative lawmakers like Banks — and right-wing groups like Students for Concealed Carry — who advocate for their agenda under the guise of “protecting women” are relying on a popular tactic from the anti-choice community. Anti-abortion activists often construe policies that hurt women, like limiting access to abortion clinics or imposing waiting periods for legal medical procedures, as methods of keeping women safe.