The opportunities and challenges of data analytics in health care

This report is part of "A Blueprint for the Future of AI," a series from the Brookings Institution that analyzes the new challenges and potential policy solutions introduced by artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.  This report specifically addresses topics such as sensitivity of care decisions, problematic data conventions, institutional practices, misaligned incentives, and ultimately concludes with policy recommendations.

The full report can be viewed at this link.  

5 Surprising Ways In Which Telemedicine Is Revolutionizing Healthcare

“Telehealth is not a specific service, but a collection of means to enhance care and education delivery,” says the Center for Connected Health Policy (CCHP). CCHP further classify telehealth into four types of services, live-video conferencing, mobile health, remote patient monitoring, and store-and-forward. Most telehealth platforms provide one or more of these services, to a niche patient or consumer segment.

Here are five surprising ways in which telehealth is revolutionizing healthcare.  

1. Remote elderly monitoring
2. Remote psychiatric care
3. Getting a second opinion
4. Care in remote locations
5. Redefining health insurance

The full Forbes article with details on these points can be viewed at this link.  

Assessing the Privacy of mHealth Apps for Self-Tracking: Heuristic Evaluation Approach

In this paper, we have introduced a novel heuristic evaluation method for examining the state of privacy in QS (quantified self) apps. We found that the majority of apps do not meet our privacy criteria, including notification of fundamental data protection characteristics, or the criteria on ability to export user data. High-profile apps are among those that exhibit poor privacy behaviors, which can make it difficult for users to make informed choices about which apps to trust with their data. Our heuristics can provide designers with a resource to maintain privacy in the design of self-tracking services and avoid common pitfalls, which can engender mistrust or lead to privacy issues. As the heuristics were guided by both the EU and US regulatory environment, they may also help guide data controllers to perform impact assessments for both privacy and data protection. We have provided the tools and documentation necessary to replicate our findings and confirm the usability of the heuristics and allow the evolving privacy landscape to be evaluated. In future work, we will examine the usefulness of the heuristics by using them to capture people’s privacy preferences and recommend services that meet their requirements.

The full article can be downloaded below.  

Privacy of Clinical Research Subjects: An Integrative Literature Review with Best Practices

With changes in clinical research practice, the importance of a study-subject’s privacy and the confidentiality of their personal data is growing. However, the body of research is fragmented, and a synthesis of work in this area is lacking. Accordingly, an integrative review was performed, guided by Whittemore and Knafl’s work. Data from PubMed, Scopus, and CINAHL searches from January 2012 to February 2017 were analyzed via the constant comparison method. From 16 empirical and theoretical studies, six topical aspects were identified: the evolving nature of health data in clinical research, sharing of health data, the challenges of anonymizing data, collaboration among stakeholders, the complexity of regulation, and ethics-related tension between social benefits and privacy. Study subjects’ privacy is an increasingly important ethics principle for clinical research, and privacy protection is rendered even more challenging by changing research practice.

The article concludes with suggested best practices based upon the findings.  

Best Practices

• Encourage collaboration - Collaboration among stakeholders is one of the prerequisites for protecting privacy in clinical research.
• Transparency - A well applied, transparent process with properly surveilled procedures ensures compliance with legal guidelines.   
• Reduce tension - The tension between study-subject privacy protection and benefits to society must be eased. This requires, public trust and more flexible privacy rules. But most important is a guarantee of adequate research-ethics training for researchers and clinical-study staff, with solid recognition of the moral rationale behind the regulations.

The full article can be downloaded below.  

Plugging the Gaps in the Continuum of Care

As the U.S. population ages, it becomes increasingly important to keep seniors from falling into the gaps in the continuum of care. With 86 million people expected to reach the age of 65 and beyond by 2050, private sector and community organizations will have to find new ways to collaborate and work together to help care for them.

Continuum of care is a concept involving the overarching system that guides and tracks patients during their life journey through the healthcare system. It spans all levels and intensity of care. There are seven basic categories of continuum services:

1. Extended care
2. Acute hospital care
3. Ambulatory care
4. Home care
5. Outreach
6. Wellness
7. Housing organizations

In a perfect world, the hand-off between each of these organizations and providers would be seamless. This would reduce the chance of hunger and neglect among seniors, of hospital readmission, and of the mismanagement of chronic and acute medical conditions.

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.  

Still Bullish on Blockchain: Experts Give a Lay of the Land

At a healthcare modernization event this week, health IT thought leaders weighed in on where things stand regarding blockchain’s push into healthcare.

Although there are still more questions than answers regarding the impact that blockchain technology will have on healthcare, many health IT experts remain convinced of its promise.

The full Healthcare Informatics article can be viewed at this link.  

The Digital Scribe

Current generation electronic health records suffer a number of problems that make them inefficient and associated with poor clinical satisfaction. Digital scribes or intelligent documentation support systems, take advantage of advances in speech recognition, natural language processing and artificial intelligence, to automate the clinical documentation task currently conducted by humans. Whilst in their infancy, digital scribes are likely to evolve through three broad stages. Human led systems task clinicians with creating documentation, but provide tools to make the task simpler and more effective, for example with dictation support, semantic checking and templates. Mixed-initiative systems are delegated part of the documentation task, converting the conversations in a clinical encounter into summaries suitable for the electronic record. Computer-led systems are delegated full control of documentation and only request human interaction when exceptions are encountered. Intelligent clinical environments permit such augmented clinical encounters to occur in a fully digitised space where the environment becomes the computer. Data from clinical instruments can be automatically transmitted, interpreted using AI and entered directly into the record. Digital scribes raise many issues for clinical practice, including new patient safety risks. Automation bias may see clinicians automatically accept scribe documents without checking. The electronic record also shifts from a human created summary of events to potentially a full audio, video and sensor record of the clinical encounter. Digital scribes promisingly offer a gateway into the clinical workflow for more advanced support for diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic tasks.

The full article can be downloaded below.  

Implementing Blockchains for Efficient Healthcare: A Systematic Review

The scattered nature of sensitive health information can bring about situations where timely information is unavailable, worsening health outcomes. Furthermore, as patient involvement in healthcare increases, there is a growing need for patients to access and control their data. Blockchain is a secure decentralised online ledger that could be used to manage electronic health records efficiently, and so improve health outcomes by enabling interoperability.

The full article can be downloaded below.  

Securing legacy medical devices is daunting – but not optional: Best Practices

Between high-profile hacks and hospitals’ growing dependency on connected medical devices, cybersecurity is as relevant to healthcare as it’s ever been. And while providers and device manufacturers are rightfully making protection a priority for newly developed or purchased medical devices, older legacy devices pose the greatest security risk to healthcare organizations.  MobiHealthNews looks at expert opinions on this topic.  

Best Practices

• Start at the beginning - Take the time to take inventory of relevant devices.  Identifying problems are crucial to being able to solve them.  
• Prioritize threats - Assess the risk for attack for each medical device.
• Consider consequences - What are the consequences if an attack succeeds?  What are the backup plans if a device fails?  
• Build a baseline - What does normal traffic look like for these devices and networks?  
• Plug holes - Be proactive and preventative when it comes to cybersecurity, while also being realistic about what can be achieved.  

The full article can be viewed at this link.  

U.S. National Health IT Week (NHIT Week) is a nationwide awareness week focused on catalyzing actionable change within the U.S. health system through the application of information and technology. Founded by HIMSS and the Institute for e-Policy in 2006, the week-long celebration is comprised of partner-driven activities and events led by the efforts of national health stakeholders. Participants range from the Administration, congressional, federal and state agencies, providers, non-profit organizations and more. Virtually, in Washington DC and beyond, National Health IT Week stakeholders collaborate towards actionable outcomes which demonstrate the power information and technology has to transform health in the U.S., and its wide-reaching global impact.