The pitfalls of pandemic apps, Epic’s data network, & Medicare’s race data problem
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Just one smaller phase for interoperability
Epic said it will participate in a govt-led work to strengthen the trade of patient data throughout America’s byzantine community of health software devices. The company declared that it will seek to variety a so-named Qualified Health Information Community that uses typical data benchmarks (acknowledged as TEFCA) to exchange info on people. Participation is not mandatory, so obtaining the assistance of an field giant like Epic indicates the government’s effort and hard work stands a much superior likelihood of functioning. But we are however a pretty prolonged way from making a seamless flow of data that would essentially put the passions of people ahead of the health systems and program suppliers that keep their knowledge bottled up.
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The pitfalls of pandemic applications
Each and every phase of the pandemic has come with its corresponding set of applications. Smartphones have come to be a platform for get hold of tracing, epidemiological study, and personal Covid-19 chance evaluation, notes a new overview in Character Biotechnology — but number of applications have created the impact their designers hoped. Pandit, director of Electronic Drugs at Scripps Study Translational Institute and one particular of the authors on the paper, pointed out a variety of pitfalls of pandemic-centered apps, which includes inadequate privacy laws, small adoption, and a absence of data criteria.
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He hopes the work will spur extra exploration to decide which digitally-enabled interventions — if any — built a variation in the pandemic’s trajectory, and integrate the results into public health playbooks. STAT’s Edward Chen has the entire tale.
Practical ideas on digital privateness
Amid the thrust to digitize medical trials and health care extra broadly, reduction of privateness and private autonomy usually take a back again seat to perceived added benefits these types of as benefit and relieve of participation. In a new paper, Duke University’s Eric Perakslis seeks to greater define the potential privateness-connected harms and advise methods to mitigate them. He emphasizes that defending privacy doesn’t just indicate stopping id theft, it suggests preserving a person’s ideal to self-perseverance. That latter goal will become exponentially extra complicated in a entire world the place patients’ knowledge, even if de-identified, is staying aggregated and bought for commercial applications. “The far more details collected on and about a human being,” Perakslis writes, “the less difficult it is to manipulate that person’s actions by means of qualified content” this kind of as advertisements that pop on social media web pages.
In an atmosphere in which such procedures are pervasive and loosely regulated, Perakslis claimed purveyors of digitized trials and solutions need to think about getting 10 steps to shield sufferers. Among the them: guaranteeing that agreements with 3rd-occasion firms stop secondary use of info, limiting the development of new affected individual accounts to acquire facts, and auditing algorithms employed to analyze information for accuracy and bias.
Medicare wants much better race and ethnicity details
A new report from HHS’s Office of the Inspector General showed glaring gaps and inaccuracies in Medicare’s details on the race and ethnicity of enrollees — details crucial to its said intention of advancing health equity. Most of its race and ethnicity information will come from the Social Protection Administration, or is imputed working with an algorithm that elements in last title, geography, and language desire. But in comparison to self-claimed race and ethnicity from a subset of beneficiaries in nursing residences, that info was often completely wrong, in particular for American Indian/Alaska Indigenous, Asian/Pacific Islander, or Hispanic beneficiaries. The report phone calls for CMS to create its individual resource of race and ethnicity data, use self-documented race, and standardize its information selection.
Optum-izing health data
- UnitedHealth’s Optum subsidiary is obtaining the U.K. health software company EMIS Group for $1.5 billion in dollars. EMIS would make application to monitor pharmacy and key treatment solutions, which would feed into Optum’s endeavours to provide details analysis to the UK’s National Health Service.
- SteadyMD, a company-to-business enterprise service provider of telehealth computer software, is acquiring BlocHealth, a clinician licensing and credentialing system. The go will support SteadyMD far more promptly recruit and deploy clinicians as part of a workforce distribute throughout all 50 states.
- Walgreens is launching a clinical trials company that will emphasis on aiding with recruitment of varied affected individual populations and allowing for for electronic participation and facts collection. It is teaming up on the effort and hard work with Pluto Health, which seeks to coordinate health services by linking siloed affected person details.
- The AI imaging company Aidoc raised $110 million in a Sequence D spherical led by TVC and Alpha Intelligence Funds. The firm options to use the cash to embed its program system in medical center service strains and specialties.
- Swing Therapeutics, which makes digital therapies focused on autoimmune and persistent agony situations, lifted $10.3 million in a Series A spherical led by JAZZ Venture Companions. The influx of funding will support fork out for a randomized clinical trial to look into its remedy for treating fibromyalgia.
- Proximie, the marker of a virtual surgery platform, lifted $80 million in a Sequence C spherical led by Arrival Daily life Sciences. The company’s to start with software authorized surgeons to hook up virtually to working rooms and it is now creating services to compile and examine surgical procedure facts to strengthen care.
What we’re looking through
- Smarter health: Regulating AI in health care, WBUR
- You agreed to what? Medical doctor check out-in program harvests your health data, The Washington Submit
- How scientists are employing previous phones to display screen for Alzheimer’s, The Verge