Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance 2018

Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance 2018 presents statistics and trends for STDs in the United States through 2018. This annual publication is intended as a reference document for policy makers, program managers, health planners, researchers, and others who are concerned with the public health implications of these diseases. 

The full CDC report can be viewed at this link.

What Fintech Can Do For Healthcare

In most countries, the process of paying for health coverage is not just costly, but complicated, stressful, and time consuming. It also prohibits people from accessing care.

If exorbitant prescription drug prices and out of pocket expenses were not already enough, healthcare consumers must also navigate payment systems known for their obscurity and susceptibility to error. These systems not only overwhelm current users, but also discourages new ones from finding the coverage that is right for them.

The relationship between a healthcare consumer and their healthcare financing should not—and does not—have to be so fraught. As health services becoming increasingly digital, more opportunities open up for companies to stage data driven interventions that can modernize, and hopefully revitalize, our fragmented healthcare networks.

Such is the aim of fintech, or financial technology, that brings new and improved digital financial service models into the healthcare space. Fintech companies are leveraging powerful innovations blockchain, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to eliminate the inefficiencies and knowledge gaps endemic to most healthcare payment plans. With few exceptions, what unites them all is their ability to streamline the flow of information and money between patients and providers—and in doing so, save everyone involved precious time and effort.

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.  

Protecting Explainable AI Innovations In Health Care

Health care innovators are developing artificial intelligence algorithms called Explainable AI (XAI) that actually reveal the logic behind their diagnoses. Because their results can be verified, doctors and regulators will be more likely to adopt these algorithms than traditional “black box” AI. However, the transparency that makes these algorithms valuable to practitioners also makes the technology trickier to protect as intellectual property.

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.  

How Are We Going To Use Our Health Data For Public Good?

Google is accessing the health data of millions of Americans, supposedly to develop algorithms able to diagnose some medical problems. What it is doing is legal, but has set off a privacy scare and a federal inquiry after an employee of the company wrote an anonymous article in The Guardian highlighting the lack of anonymity and concerns about the possible uses of the data in the future.

Known internally as Project Nightingale, the project involves some 250 employees from Google and from the health giant Ascension: Google has denied any wrongdoings or privacy violations stating that the company is just building a new internal search tool for the Ascension hospital network and that no patient data is being used for Google’s artificial intelligence research. This is an extremely interesting project, but one that requires strict privacy protections. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, which also works on health-related issues through its companies Calico or Verily, and that recently acquired Fitbit, is not the only technology company interested in data collection and its analysis: Apple has been hiring doctors for some time and working with Stanford University to develop macro-studies with almost half a million users using heart rate data provided by their Apple Watches; Amazon also seems to have set its sights on the healthcare market.

These types of studies, which combine machine learning and the obvious expertise of these companies to handle mass health data, are a new frontier in the field of medicine, where studies are much less ambitious and typically involve much lower amounts of data, while offering the possibility of great advances for society. That said, concerns are justified if the studies take place under conditions that allow, by action or omission, the health data of its participants to be exposed or used for purposes other than originally established, or if people are not allowed to opt out, as seems to be the case.

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.  

The right tech can help give doctors back time with patients: AMA CEO

Augmented intelligence (AI) is certain to be a key player in revolutionizing health care for the next generation of physicians and patients. But what about actual intelligence, the kind produced by human brains?  

It, too, will be instrumental, AMA Executive Vice President and CEO James L. Madara, MD, noted in his address to delegates at the opening session of the 2019 AMA Interim Meeting in San Diego.  

The full AMA article can be viewed at this link.  

Patients’ and public views and attitudes towards the sharing of health data for research: a narrative review of the empirical evidence

International sharing of health data opens the door to the study of the so-called ’Big Data’, which holds great promise for improving patient-centred care. Failure of recent data sharing initiatives indicates an urgent need to invest in societal trust in researchers and institutions. Key to an informed understanding of such a ’social license’ is identifying the views patients and the public may hold with regard to data sharing for health research.

We performed a narrative review of the empirical evidence addressing patients’ and public views and attitudes towards the use of health data for research purposes. The literature databases PubMed (MEDLINE), Embase, Scopus and Google Scholar were searched in April 2019 to identify relevant publications. Patients’ and public attitudes were extracted from selected references and thematically categorised.

Twenty-seven papers were included for review, including both qualitative and quantitative studies and systematic reviews. Results suggest widespread—though conditional—support among patients and the public for data sharing for health research. Despite the fact that participants recognise actual or potential benefits of data research, they expressed concerns about breaches of confidentiality and potential abuses of the data. Studies showed agreement on the following conditions: value, privacy, risk minimisation, data security, transparency, control, information, trust, responsibility and accountability.

Our results indicate that a social license for data-intensive health research cannot simply be presumed. To strengthen the social license, identified conditions ought to be operationalised in a governance framework that incorporates the diverse patient and public values, needs and interests.

The full article can be downloaded below.  

ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE THREATS IN THE UNITED STATES

CDC’s Antibiotic Resistance Threats in the United States, 2019 (2019 AR Threats Report) includes updated national death and infection estimates that underscore the continued threat of antibiotic resistance in the United States. New CDC data show that while the burden of antibiotic-resistance threats in the United States was greater than initially understood, deaths are decreasing since the 2013 report. This suggests that U.S. efforts—preventing infections, stopping spread of bacteria and fungi, and improving use of antibiotics in humans, animals, and the environment—are working, especially in hospitals. Vaccination, where possible, has also shown to be an effective tool of preventing infections, including those that can be resistant, in the community.

Yet the number of people facing antibiotic resistance in the United States is still too high. More than 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections occur in the United States each year, and more than 35,000 people die as a result. In addition, nearly 223,900 people in the United States required hospital care for C. difficile and at least 12,800 people died in 2017.

Germs continue to spread and develop new types of resistance, and progress may be undermined by some community-associated infections that are on the rise. More action is needed to address antibiotic resistance. While the development of new treatments is one of these key actions, such investments must be coupled with dedicated efforts toward preventing infections in the first place, slowing the development of resistance through better antibiotic use, and stopping the spread of resistance when it does develop to protect American lives now and in the future.

The full report can be viewed at this link.  

Risks and remedies for artificial intelligence in health care

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly entering health care and serving major roles, from automating drudgery and routine tasks in medical practice to managing patients and medical resources. As developers create AI systems to take on these tasks, several risks and challenges emerge, including the risk of injuries to patients from AI system errors, the risk to patient privacy of data acquisition and AI inference, and more. Potential solutions are complex but involve investment in infrastructure for high-quality, representative data; collaborative oversight by both the Food and Drug Administration and other health-care actors; and changes to medical education that will prepare providers for shifting roles in an evolving system.

The full Brookings Institution report can be viewed at this link.  

Electronic Medical Records, Burnout, And “Man’s 4th Best Hospital”

Graduating from medical school in 1978, I started my hellish internship while reading Samuel Shem’s classic, “The House of G-d,” a scathing indictment of medical education and the mercenary incentives in patient care. I found it shocking, crude at times and disillusioning—but at its core, absolutely correct about what was happening in medicine that was so wrong.

Thus it seems fitting that I received a review copy of Shem’s new book, “Man’s 4^th Best Hospital,” as my medical career is coming to a close. Once again, Shem nails where medical care has lost its way. Physician “burnout” and dissatisfaction are increasing in step with patients’ unhappiness.

Much of the blame can be attributed to two things—corporate greed and electronic medical records, which are like conjoined twins. There’s no small irony that this is what is forcing many experienced physicians, like myself, out of practice prematurely, contributing to a waste of both talent and experience that is needless and costly.

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.