Healthcare During and After 9/11

If you’re interested in reading a more personal post about 9/11, you can check out this post I did on EMR and HIPAA about teaching the new generation about 9/11.

As I’ve watched the various news stories, documentaries and memorials about 9/11, this 60 Minutes news story about a doctor caring for 9/11 survivors was incredibly fascinating. Turns out, he set up a free clinic for the survivors and also started doing interviews with these people so that their stories would be recorded for others to hear. If you didn’t see it, you should search for it on CBS.com.

The opening to the 60 Minutes video had me wondering about how healthcare dealt with all the injuries in the aftermath of September 11th. It seems like so many angles of September 11th have been covered, I can’t remember ever seeing the stories of hospitals and other doctors trying to treat the influx of patients that no doubt overwhelmed their doors. If you know of some, I’d love to see them.

Maybe that’s not such a terrible thing that the focus hasn’t been on the healthcare stories. Maybe it’s better that we focus on the heroes who lost their lives that day. Although, I’m sure we’re going to hear more and more healthcare-related stories about 9/11 illnesses as time passes. Too bad we don’t have an integrated EMR with HIE that could help to track all those that were exposed to the gases and dust that were found at ground zero. That might help their cause since the 9/11 First Responders bill is only for the next 5 years.

John Halamka also has a post up about the impact of 9/11 on Healthcare IT. He concludes that “Disaster recovery, security, and emergency support efforts will continue, inspired by the memories of those who perished 10 years ago.”

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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