Here are a few I came across last week.
Note: Each link is followed by a title and few paragraphs. For the full article click on the link above title of the article. Note also that full access to some links may require site registration or subscription payment.
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https://healthitanalytics.com/news/mass-general-hits-health-equality-via-demographic-data-collection
Mass General Hits Health Equality via Demographic Data Collection
Mass General Brigham announces a campaign to collect demographic data in order to create equitable care for all.
June 25, 2021 - Mass General Brigham has announced the launch of a campaign to collect more accurate and complete demographic data from the hospital’s more than one million adult primary care patients. This demographic data will consist of information such as ethnicity, age, and medical history.
With the provided information, medical professionals will use it in determining a patient’s vulnerability to certain illnesses and which treatments will be most effective for them. The goal of this campaign is to improve access to healthcare programs and services and provide more equitable care for everyone.
The hospital’s current data for patient's race/ethnicity/language has about a 20 percent rate of missing data depending on the location. Mass General Brigham’s new goal is to have a less than 5 percent rate of missing data across the primary care population.
“There are very clear inequities between patients based on their race, ethnicity and whether English is their primary language,” said Allison Bryant, MD MPH, Senior Medical Director for Health Equity at Mass General Brigham in a press release. “Without quality data, our decision-making falls flat about how we equitably distribute programs and services.”
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https://www.digitalhealth.net/2021/06/hancock-data-strategy/
Hancock: How the data strategy will improve care and fuel innovation
In an exclusive blog for Digital Health, the Secretary of State for Health and Care Matt Hancock outlines how the draft data strategy will help improve care, fuel innovation and save lives.
DHI News Team – 22 June, 2021
In our fight against coronavirus, one of the most powerful tools we possessed was the power of data.
Data helped us to identify the people most vulnerable to coronavirus and ask them to shield, allowed new care pathways like virtual wards, and powered vital research that helped us discover new treatments for Covid that have saved over a million lives so far around the world.
This pandemic has shown once and for all that data saves lives. So just as we recognise the hardship and devastation that this virus has brought, we must also recognise the phenomenal progress we’ve seen in the use of data.
This crisis has led to one of the greatest transformations to how we live and work in peacetime, and it’s the smart use of data has made that possible. We must raise our sights, and go further, learning lessons from the crisis
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https://www.digitalhealth.net/2021/06/patients-to-get-easier-access-to-medical-data-through-nhs-app/
Data Strategy: Patients to get easier access to medical data through NHS App
Patients are set to get easier access to their medication lists and care plans through the NHS App under the government’s new data strategy.
Andrea Downey = 22 June 2021
New requirements for data sharing across the entire health and care system are also set to come into place, with new legislation to be introduced to require all adult social care providers to provide information about the services they fund.
Published today (June 22), the NHSX draft strategy ‘Data Saves Lives: Reshaping health and social care with data’, aims to capitalise on the work undertaken using data during the pandemic to improve health and care services.
In a bid to establish openness, the government committed to publishing the first transparency statement setting out how health and care data has been used across the sector by 2022.
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https://khn.org/news/article/calming-computer-jitters-help-for-seniors-who-arent-tech-savvy/
Calming Computer Jitters: Help for Seniors Who Aren’t Tech-Savvy
By Judith Graham June 24, 2021
Six months ago, Cindy Sanders, 68, bought a computer so she could learn how to email and have Zoom chats with her great-grandchildren.
It’s still sitting in a box, unopened.
“I didn’t know how to set it up or how to get help,” said Sanders, who lives in Philadelphia and has been extremely careful during the coronavirus pandemic.
Like Sanders, millions of older adults are newly motivated to get online and participate in digital offerings after being shut inside, hoping to avoid the virus, for more than a year. But many need assistance and aren’t sure where to get it.
A recent survey from AARP, conducted in September and October, highlights the quandary. It found that older adults boosted technology purchases during the pandemic but more than half (54%) said they needed a better grasp of the devices they’d acquired. Nearly 4 in 10 people (37%) admitted they weren’t confident about using these technologies.
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https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/technology-both-burden-and-benefit-physicians
Jun 23 2021
Workflow can determine whether technology is a burden or benefit to physicians
Knowing how doctors work, seeing "how their brains worked" helped inform new app.
Susan Morse, Managing Editor
Technology is a known benefit and burden for physicians.
So when Ludi, Inc. CEO and founder Gail Peace introduced a new software designed to help physicians log their time, she went to their offices to observe how they used the new technology and how it fit into their workflow.
The idea is for physicians to log their time daily, for no more than 15 minutes a month being spent on the DocTime Log.
None of the physicians clicked on a button asking for more detail. One physician kept pressing submit when once was enough.
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Feds warned that algorithms can introduce bias to clinical decisions
AMA Equity Plan 2021-2023
Embedding equity into medicine requires planning and honesty. To meet this moment, the AMA has developed a plan to advance racial and social justice.
At the request of Congress, the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) is examining how clinical algorithms may introduce bias into clinical decision-making and the AMA provided information to aid the effort.
AHRQ, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, issued a request for information on how algorithms can introduce bias and subsequently “influence access to care, quality of care, or health outcomes for racial and ethnic minorities and people who are socioeconomically disadvantaged.”
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Key Insights and Takeaways from the HIMSS State of Healthcare Event
June 25, 2021
Last week HIMSS presented their State of Healthcare digital event that presented new data-driven market intelligence to the healthcare ecosystem. The data was fueled by survey insights gathered through the HIMSS Trust—a consortium of leaders across the healthcare and technology space. They presented trends and challenges from four key perspectives:
- Health Systems
- Patients
- Clinicians
- Payers
In case you missed the live event, below are just some of the insights and takeaways shared during the session.
Start Measuring Digital Health Progress Now!
When it comes to Digital Health, if you’re not measuring your progress..YOU ARE BEHIND! Respondents were asked “How are digital health initiatives currently tracked and monitored?” Findings show that 60% are measuring/tracking digital health program performance whether it be from a system-level dashboard that tracks all initiatives or from a regular/quarterly prorgess updates.
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https://healthitanalytics.com/news/data-questions-sepsis-prediction-models-predictive-analytics
Data Questions Sepsis Prediction Models, Predictive Analytics
Researchers at Michigan Medicine suggest that Epic’s sepsis prediction model is less accurate than previously claimed.
June 24, 2021 - In a recent evaluation of Epic Systems’ sepsis prediction model, scientists suggest that the model identifies those at risk of sepsis just 63 percent of the time. This is much lower than the model’s information sheet claims at between 76 and 83 percent, the researchers said.
This comes as 56 percent of hospitals and health systems in the United States use Epic Systems.
Sepsis presents itself as a challenging issue in healthcare. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one and three patients who die in the hospital have sepsis, but is difficult to predict which patients are at risk of developing the condition.
“Sepsis is something we can know occurs with certainty after the fact, but when it’s unfolding, it’s often unclear whether a patient has sepsis or not,” Karandeep Singh, MD, MMSc, assistant professor of Learning Health Sciences and Internal Medicine at Michigan Medicine, said in a report. “But the cornerstone of sepsis treatment is timely recognition and timely therapy.”
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Physician viewpoint: Monetizing EHRs with open data puts patients at risk
Hannah Mitchell – 24 June, 2021
The most valuable thing inside a hospital's walls may not be its care services or expensive equipment; it might be the troves of patient data stored on EHRs, according to a June 5 article published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Hospitals are increasingly selling troves of deidentified medical data. Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic is using its patient data to create an artificial intelligence factory with Google. Nashville, Tenn.-based HCA Healthcare and Google inked a multiyear collaboration to build a health data analytics platform to support its operational workflows. Fourteen health systems partnered to create a firm that aggregates and sells deidentified data and gives more insight on medical conditions such as rare diseases and COVID-19.
The article's authors are researchers from Boston Children's Hospital, Boston-based Harvard Medical School and Durham, N.C.-based Duke University Medical Center.
Five things to know:
- HIPAA allows covered healthcare providers, payers and clearinghouses to use patient data freely once it has been deidentified. These policies enable a multibillion-dollar industry of companies who aggregate patient data for profit. Even as patients and physicians navigate difficulties obtaining medical record details in a timely fashion, hoards of unregulated patient data are passing through hospital networks and into the hands of tech companies, the article noted.
- Open data can help drive better treatment decisions, yet where the data goes after this might not serve the public. In one example, a data aggregation firm may use the data to target patients for pharmaceutical detailing and encourage physicians to push their products, which can increase drug costs and the overprescription of medicine.
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https://www.healthcareittoday.com/2021/06/24/top-it-priorities-according-to-healthcare-leaders/
Top IT Priorities According to Healthcare Leaders
June 24, 2021
As healthcare leaders, you have the hard job of knowing what to prioritize in your organization. Every leader is inundated with ideas, projects, and new technology that could help their organization better care for patients. Sorting through all of these can be a challenge.
What makes this challenge even harder is all the latest buzzwords that keep cropping up and distract our focus. Being able to know when a buzzword is worthy of your attention is the sign of a great leader. That often means focusing on the less sexy parts of healthcare IT while you allow the cutting edge technology to mature.
In a survey sponsored by Halo Health, we asked healthcare leaders to identify their most important health IT priorities. Here’s a summary of what more than 140 healthcare leaders shared:
The top two priorities will likely come as no surprise to anyone in health IT. Given the number of security incidents and ransomware cases, I’d be upset if data security wasn’t the top priority for a healthcare organization. Between moving to value based care and the 21st Century Cures Act, interoperability is also on every healthcare organization’s mind.
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athenahealth Exec: Healthcare Tech Will Build on Telehealth, Remote Care
Analysis | By Jack O'Brien | June 23, 2021
Paul Brient, Chief Product Officer at the Watertown, Massachusetts-based electronic health records vendor, underscores the goals of working with Apple and promoting healthcare innovation.
Earlier this month, athenahealth announced that it would support a new iOS15 feature that would allow patients to share their Apple Health data with their providers.
The company stated that the move was made as part of an effort to "enable bringing external insights and innovations to the point of care" while also leveraging athenahealth's FHIR Launch and App Tab experience so that providers "can view their patients' shared data within their native athenaClinicals workflows via an Apple-provided app."
HL: Can you give a high-level overview of the Apple Health news for our audience of healthcare executives and how athenahealth is supporting this?
Brient: Recently, Apple announced that they are working with several HIT partners, including athenahealth, on an upcoming feature that will enable patients to securely share data from the Apple Health app – including data from certain health records categories like lab test results and immunizations, as well as health information, such as exercise minutes, heart rate, or hours of sleep, from iPhone, Apple Watch and third-party connected devices — directly with their providers. We’re excited to offer this option to empower the patient as a critical part of the care team with control of their data.
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https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/23/22547397/medical-records-health-data-hospitals-research
Hospitals are selling treasure troves of medical data — what could go wrong?
They don’t need patient consent to use de-identified data
By Nicole Wetsman Jun 23, 2021, 2:22pm EDT
Healthcare organizations and hospitals in the United States all sit on treasure troves: a stockpile of patient health data stored as electronic medical records. Those files show what people are sick with, how they were treated, and what happened next. Taken together, they’re hugely valuable resources for medical discovery.
Because of certain provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), healthcare organizations are able to put that treasure trove to work. As long as they de-identify the records — removing information like patient names, locations, and phone numbers — they can give or sell the data to partners for research. They don’t need to get consent from patients to do it or even tell them about it.
More and more healthcare groups are taking advantage of those partnerships. The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, is working with startups to develop algorithms to diagnose and manage conditions based on health data. Fourteen US health systems formed a company to aggregate and sell de-identified data earlier this year. The healthcare company HCA announced a new data deal with Google in May.
There may be benefits to sharing this data — researchers can learn what types of treatments are best for people with certain medical conditions and develop tools to improve care. But there are risks to free-flowing data, says Eric Perakslis, chief science and digital officer at the Duke Clinical Research Institute. He outlined the ways the system could potentially harm patients in a recent New England Journal of Medicine article with Kenneth Mandl, director of the computational health informatics program at Boston Children’s Hospital.
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Primary Care Workforce Burnout Goes Beyond EHR Use to Leadership Style
While EHR use has often been attributed to workforce burnout, organizational leadership and culture plays a large role in workforce satisfaction.
June 23, 2021 - A new Health Affairs study found that burnout was not associated with EHR satisfaction or the number of patients seen per clinician. Instead, researchers found that facilitative leadership centered on building relationships, enhancing communication, ensuring psychological safety, and promoting teamwork, is linked with low rates of workforce burnout.
Facilitative leadership strays from traditional hierarchal structures, allowing for practices to foster emerging leadership skills among all practice members, the study authors explained.
The findings are based on a survey of 715 small-to-medium primary care practices.
“Survey respondents who felt a greater sense of support and job control could balance known stressors – including high volume of patients – and showed lower rates of overall burnout,” Samuel T. Edwards, MD, MPH, assistant professor of medicine at the OHSU School of Medicine and the study’s lead author, said in a press release.
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https://healthitanalytics.com/news/epic-systems-pulls-ahead-for-population-health-management-vendors
Epic Systems Pulls Ahead for Population Health Management Vendors
Arcadia, Epic, and Innovaccer receive recognition as most-well rounded leaders in population health management.
June 23, 2021 - In a report by KLAS Research evaluating 15 different vendors, Arcadia, Epic, and Innovaccer are highlighted as the most-well rounded leaders in population health management to date.
As provider organizations search to advance their value-based care strategies, they are turning to population health management technology to give them the confidence to move towards value-based care.
The KLAS report provides insight into the major population health management technology that is currently offered. This includes the types of organizations that use population health management systems, highlighting what the customer experience is like, which solutions are seeing the most market energy and the breadth of their population health management capabilities, all areas that Arcadia, Epic, and Innovaccer excelled in.
While Arcadia, Epic, and Innovaccer shined in the overall excellence category, other vendors were showcased in the report as well. For Customer Success, KLAS rated vendors Innovaccer, Azara Healthcare, Cedar Gate Technologies (Enli), and HealthEC with high marks.
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4 Strategies for Addressing, Avoiding AI Algorithmic Bias in Healthcare
The Center of Applied AI at Chicago Booth’s playbook recommends assessing risk for AI algorithmic bias and continuously monitoring.
June 23, 2021 - AI algorithmic bias is everywhere, according to the Center for Applied AI at Chicago Booth in their recently released playbook. Through working with dozens of organizations such as healthcare providers, insurers, technology companies, and regulators, the center states that algorithmic bias is found all throughout the healthcare industry. These biases influence clinical care, operational workflows, and policy.
These algorithms are put in place to help decision makers determine who needs resources. The idea is if two people are scored the same using the algorithm, then they will have the same basic needs. This method is supposed to assist in making a more equitable and efficient method of care. According to the Center for Applied AI at Chicago Booth, the color of an individual’s skin or other sensitive attributes should not matter when determining need, and algorithms that fail this test are biased.
There are reasons behind the algorithmic bias. The first reason could be that an organization tried to hit the correct target but excludes those that are underserved in the population. This could be due to researchers being trained or evaluated in non-diverse populations.
Algorithms may also aim at the wrong target altogether.
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https://mhealthintelligence.com/news/telehealth-yields-similar-outcomes-as-in-person-hiv-treatment
Telehealth Yields Similar Outcomes as In-Person HIV Treatment
A new study finds that treating HIV with telehealth produces similar health outcomes as face-to-face treatment, presenting a potential solution for individuals in rural areas who have difficulty accessing care.
June 23, 2021 - The use of telehealth in HIV treatment for patients living in rural Georgia showed comparable results to in-person care, according to a study published in Open Forum Infectious Diseases.
More than one million people above the age of 13 in the United States live with HIV. Many go for extended periods of time without treatment due to care disparities that hinder access to care, such as a lack of transportation or a lack of specialists in the area. In rural areas, those disparities are more pronounced, with patients often driving several hours to the nearest clinic or practice to receive treatment.
To test the value of a connected health platform in a rural area like Georgia, a research team from Augusta University and Massachusetts General Hospital looked at 185 individuals from the Dublin Department of Health HIV clinic database who used telehealth and compared their health outcomes with 200 individuals from the August University HIV clinic patient database who received traditional face-to-face treatment. The telemedicine participants received their treatment via two-way video conferencing with an infectious diseases physician.
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Income, Education, Social Issues Leading SDOH Limiting Care Access
Researchers said understanding leading SDOH affecting care access and screening among high-risk populations can influence policy and organization-level interventions.
By Sara Heath
June 23, 2021 - New research out of NewYork-Presbyterian and Weill Cornell Medicine revealed that economic factors like income, educational attainment, and social issues like social stigma and discrimination are the leading social determinants of health limiting care access for patients.
The data, published in the journal Ethnicity and Disease, aims to inform public policy and help healthcare providers better understand the social determinants of health affecting patients. In doing so, the researchers said providers can cater their treatment plans to account for SDOH, according to Erica Phillips, MD, an associate attending physician at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.
“Everyone across the country is grappling with how to address social determinants of health,” Phillips, who is also associate director of community outreach and engagement at the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine, said in a public statement. “Our study shows how we might disentangle and act on the drivers of health inequities.”
The researchers looked at populations in Brooklyn, the area of New York City with the highest rate of cancer compared to other areas served by the organization. The team utilized hospital admissions and other publicly available data to pinpoint the four neighborhoods in Brooklyn— Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Coney Island, and Flatbush—most affected by breast, cervix, colon, lung, and prostate cancers.
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ONC releases framework for advancing social determinants of health for data use, interoperability
Hannah Mitchell – 23 January 2021
The Office of the National Coordinator is prioritizing addressing inequalities that have been long driven by poverty and racism. Through documenting, reporting, accessing and using social determinants of health, the ONC expects to help eliminate health disparities and improve health outcomes at an individual and nationwide level.
The ONC is releasing a framework to launch these initiatives nationwide, according to a June 17 news release.
Here are four areas the ONC said health IT can assist in achieving these goals:
- Creating standards with data: Guiding the development and adoption of health IT data standards.
- Updating infrastructure: Supporting governments as they update their infrastructure to support social determinants of health data.
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To debunk COVID-19 vaccine myths, health officials should turn to the same source that spreads them—social media
Jun 23, 2021 10:39am
Among the many COVID-19 vaccine myths circulating on social media, one of the more persistent false rumors is that the vaccine causes infertility, according to leading doctors.
Rumors about vaccines impacting fertility have been rampant and difficult to overcome, Susan Bailey, M.D., immediate past president of the American Medical Association, told lawmakers on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
Doctors play a critical role as vaccination ambassadors, Bailey testified Tuesday during a hearing to address vaccine hesitancy.
"Physicians need to be part empathetic counselors, part research scientists and part myth busters," she said.
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ONC Coordinators Share Lessons Learned, Including Listening More
Analysis | By Scott Mace | June 23, 2021
Incentives remain unaligned with the use of health IT, but 21st Century Cures Act implementation is one tool in ONC's arsenal.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
· Ultimate EHR success still requires better ties to payment models and focus on passing functional tests.
· Telehealth holds promise for increasing competition to consumers' benefit, panelists say.
· Former ONC chiefs recommend listening, current chief Micky Tripathi says ONC says every comment is taken very seriously.
· FHIR-based vaccination scheduling at the state level was a bright spot for interoperability during the pandemic, ONC chief says.
Lock-in of all sorts, ranging from the geographic lock-in of hospital consolidation to the vendor lock-in of electronic health records, was on the minds of former national coordinators of health IT during a panel last week at the virtual CHIME21 Summer Forum.
"I see telehealth as the next positive disrupter for improving care," said Rob Kolodner, MD, vice president and chief medical officer of ViTel Net, who served as national coordinator from 2007 to 2009 under former President George W. Bush.
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Microsoft has big plans for healthcare, and it's taking a different path to the rest of big tech
Common data models, a cloud just for this vertical and IoT for monitoring patients: Microsoft is taking on healthcare once again.
By Jo Best | June 21, 2021 -- 10:05 GMT (20:05 AEST) | Topic: Cloud
Healthcare seems to be top of the to-do lists of CEOs of tech's biggest companies: Amazon is launching its own healthcare business, Apple's turning the iPhone into a patient engagement and diagnostics tool, while Google's parent company Alphabet is betting heavily on healthcare through its investment arm, AI and analytics.
And the other big tech giant isn't getting left behind either: Microsoft has also got big plans. It's been looking at healthcare in the hope that technology could play a role in helping to address some of the health industry's most pressing problems.
"Some of the longest-standing challenges are around disconnectedness of data, disconnectedness of care teams, and frankly disconnectedness of patients to their own care," says Tom McGuinness, corporate VP of global healthcare & life sciences at Microsoft.
Complaints about different parts of the healthcare world not being joined up – a separation between health and social care, or between primary care and hospital medicine and so on – isn't new. But the pandemic has intensified another emerging disconnect: between virtual care and face-to-face care.
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https://medcitynews.com/2021/06/researchers-flag-privacy-risks-with-de-identified-health-data/
Researchers flag privacy risks with de-identified health data
Hospitals and other covered entities are striking a growing number of agreements to use de-identified patient data for research or to develop AI tools. But they should carefully weigh the risks of sharing this data, experts said.
By Elise Reuter
Post a comment / Jun 17, 2021 at 1:57 PM
A growing number of hospitals are banding together with tech companies to create analytics businesses, or develop predictive algorithms.
These efforts are fueled by de-identified data, which gives hospitals and other covered entities the ability to share patient data without specifically asking for their consent. Patients’ names, addresses, and other potentially identifying information are removed from these datasets, which can then be shared freely under current regulations.
Even if the privacy risks to patients in sharing de-identified data might seem minute or distant, hospitals should carefully consider them when they strike data-sharing agreements, researchers wrote in an article recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine. They advocated for specific protections for patients, including seeking patients’ consent, stepping up security measures for de-identified data, and additional legislation that would protect patients in the event of a breach.
“I think the challenge in medicine is everything is benefit-risk. It’s really easy for people to imagine the benefits, and really difficult to imagine the risks,” said Eric Perakslis, chief science and digital officer at the Duke Clinical Research Institute, and co-author of the article. “Precisely what benefit is being returned to the patients from the centers that are selling their data? If the benefit is 0, then there needs to be 0 risk.”
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https://www.statnews.com/2021/06/21/algorithm-bias-playbook-hospitals/
‘Nobody is catching it’: Algorithms used in health care nationwide are rife with bias
By Casey Ross June 21, 2021
The algorithms carry out an array of crucial tasks: helping emergency rooms nationwide triage patients, predicting who will develop diabetes, and flagging patients who need more help to manage their medical conditions.
But instead of making health care delivery more objective and precise, a new report finds, these algorithms — some of which have been in use for many years — are often making it more biased along racial and economic lines.
Researchers at the University of Chicago found that pervasive algorithmic bias is infecting countless daily decisions about how patients are treated by hospitals, insurers, and other businesses. Their report points to a gaping hole in oversight that is allowing deeply flawed products to seep into care with little or no vetting, in some cases perpetuating inequitable treatment for more than a decade before being discovered.
“I don’t know how bad this is yet, but I think we’re going to keep uncovering a bunch of cases where algorithms are biased and possibly doing harm,” said Heather Mattie, a professor of biostatistics and data science at Harvard University who was not involved in the research. She said the report points out a clear double standard in medicine: While health care institutions carefully scrutinize clinical trials, no such process is in place to test algorithms commonly used to guide care for millions of people.
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https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/research-suggests-epic-sepsis-model-lacking-predictive-power
Research suggests Epic Sepsis Model is lacking in predictive power
A retrospective study in JAMA Internal Medicine finds that the model did not identify two-thirds of sepsis patients and frequently issued false alarms.
By Kat Jercich
June 22, 2021 12:44 PM
A new study in JAMA Internal Medicine found that a sepsis prediction model included as part of Epic's electronic health record may poorly predict sepsis.
Using retrospective data, University of Michigan Medical School researchers found that the predictor did not identify two-thirds of sepsis patients.
"In this external validation study, we found the ESM to have poor discrimination and calibration in predicting the onset of sepsis at the hospitalization level," UM researchers wrote.
Epic disputed the study's findings, saying that the authors used a hypothetical approach that did not take into account the analysis and required tuning that needs to occur prior to real-world deployment to get optimal results.
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https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/digital-health-tools-can-help-covid-19-vaccine-hesitancy
Digital health tools can help with COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy
Addressing the concerns of those reluctant to get vaccinated requires a thoughtful, complex strategy. Technology can help, but not by itself.
By Kat Jercich
June 22, 2021 09:13 AM
As the pace of COVID-19 vaccination has slowed, the priorities of decision-makers have begun to turn from managing a deluge of interest toward reaching out to those who may be reluctant to get inoculated.
There is a range of reasons for such hesitancy, including distrust of a medical system that has historically failed vulnerable communities, especially people of color; concerns about cost or long-term effects; a lack of awareness of eligibility; and continued blocks to access.
"The increased attention and momentum surrounding the COVID-19 vaccination campaign provides opportunities to address the culture of vaccination and growing vaccine hesitancy through education and positive patient-provider encounters," said Poonam Bal, director of quality innovation at the National Quality Forum.
Responding to such vaccine hesitancy requires a complex, thoughtful strategy. The solution will not be one-size-fits all. But some innovators and experts say health IT can play a key role in the process.
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https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/regenstrief-study-shows-ehrs-underperforming-primary-care
Regenstrief study shows EHRs underperforming for primary care
Electronic health records are overloading outpatient docs with info in "disparate files and folders rather than presenting comprehensive, actionable data in a context that gives meaning," say researchers in a VA-funded study.
By Mike Miliard
June 22, 2021 09:34 AM
A primary care physician may care for 2,500 or more patients in a given year, and many of their patient encounters may last only 20 minutes – much of which is often spent at a computer with a back turned to the patient.
It's become a truism by now that electronic health records are often viewed askance by primary care docs, many of whom see them as detrimental to the patient encounter. But a new report from U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University details just how outpatient EHRs are often failing the physicians who use them.
WHY IT
MATTERS
The new study, Electronic Health Records' Support for Primary Care Physicians'
Situation Awareness, contends that EHRs "are not rising to the
challenges faced by primary care physicians because EHRs have not been designed
or tailored to their specific needs," according to researchers.
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Security Exceptionalism, Toxic Positivity, and Healthcare Information Security
June 22, 2021
Why we need to adopt strong C-level leadership to stop the tide of exceptionalism and toxic positivity that defines organizational approaches to information security.
IN THE BEGINNING
Many organizations consider technology to be subservient to the rest of the business. It is considered a cost center, not a valuable resource. It gets funded last, often after the flowers and coffee. This means that the business will make any excuse to not spend money on technology because it takes away from revenue. Years of education in business schools of our current C-suites to minimize “overhead” expenses and focus on core business functions have left IT in an actionable position. Nothing can go wrong because it will be seen as an excuse to further marginalize the organization and cut funding. IT Leadership becomes risk averse, often focusing on “solutions” that promise the world and deliver little, because that is what they have budget for after the Jet Ski rentals.
WHAT ARE THE EFFECTS OF THIS?
These have the effect of creating a risk-averse culture where little gets done for fear that it will go wrong and cause people to get fired or set aside by the leadership. You also end up driving away people who want to innovate and expand their knowledge, because nothing major will get done for fear that it will fail. When you do not undertake major work such as an EMR implementation or upgrade, you create an environment where people who want to advance and lead just are not welcome, and they leave. What you are left with are team members content doing the same work, ones who cannot leave, and ones who play politics to get ahead because they do not have the skills to excel in more challenging environments. It is an employee engagement nightmare.
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Bioethics Conference Poses Twenty-First Century Questions
June 22, 2021
The Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School recently held an online conference covering the current state of the field. All the standard ethical issues we talk about in medicine appear in the new genetic and biological research, often with greater urgency: safety and effectiveness, equitable access, privacy and informed consent, data sharing, and individual dignity. In addition, immense philosophical questions beyond the scope of medicine are raised. I’ll look at each of these issues in the article.
Safety and Effectiveness
Time-tested processes for assuring safety and effectiveness don’t always extend to new biological techniques, because the techniques potential effects are so hard to predict. As one example, Jun Wu cited research showing that the foreign cells introduced into a person for treatment might be broken down by cell-cell competition, a normal metabolic process leading to the death of cells (apoptosis). Treatments that don’t account for this process may seem to work in the lab and then have no effect in real life.
And when the techniques are not amenable to clinical trials, even more risk gets injected into the protoplasm. Dr.Timothy Yu and Jacob S. Sherkow said many modern experiments involve diseases so rare that it would be either unfeasible or unethical to set some patients aside as controls. Follow-up studies can provide a lot of useful data, but comparisons between patients in retrospect are less conclusive than a standard clinical trial. Jonathan Kimmelman said that at best, N-of-1 studies are “on the path to” Phase 1 studies.
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https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-57564355
NHS data strategy: Hancock defends data sharing plan
By Doug
Faulkner
BBC News
Published 22 June, 2021
NHS patients in England will get greater control over their health and social care data under plans set out by the government, Matt Hancock says.
It means people will be able to access their medical records from different parts of the NHS through various apps.
However critics are worried that data could be misused and the system has not been properly explained to patients.
In defending the plan, the health secretary said more effective use of data would deliver better patient care.
The new strategy, called Data Saves Lives, will give patients confidence that health and care staff have up-to-date information enabling them to make quicker, more informed decisions, the government said.
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https://www.healthleadersmedia.com/technology/murky-sea-mental-health-apps-consumers-left-adrift
In a Murky Sea of Mental Health Apps, Consumers Left Adrift
Analysis | By Kaiser Health News | June 22, 2021
For tech startups looking to cash in on unmet need, that translates into more than 50 million potential customers.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
· Venture capital firms invested more than $2.4 billion in digital behavioral health apps in 2020 — more than twice the amount invested in 2019 — touting support or treatment for issues from burnout and depression to ADHD and bipolar disorder. At least seven mental health app companies have achieved “unicorn” status and are valued at more than $1 billion.
· But even as industry hype mounts, researchers and companies are scrambling to prove these apps actually work. Of the estimated 20,000 mental health apps available for download on personal computers and smartphones, just five have been formally vetted and approved by the Food and Drug Administration, which largely has taken a hands-off approach to regulating the space.
This article was published on Tuesday, June 22, 2021 in Kaiser Health News.
By Jenny Gold
In the eyes of the tech industry, mental health treatment is an area ripe for disruption.
In any given year, 1 in 5 adults in the U.S. experience a form of mental illness, according to federal estimates. And research indicates only about half of them receive treatment in a system that is understaffed and ill distributed to meet demand.
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Key Steps for Opening the Digital Front Door, Digital Transformation
The digital front door is anything but a door. It’s a wraparound patient journey that connects them to care across the continuum.
By Sara Heath
June 21, 2021 - The digital front door isn’t just unlocked; it’s opening wide, and healthcare organizations that want to remain competitive need to figure out how to make it an entrance to a wholly connected patient journey.
“This is an industry that has long been considered a technology laggard of sorts over the years,” Mutaz Shegewi, IDC Health Insights research director, told PatientEngagementHIT in an interview. “Healthcare has always been slow to adopt cutting-edge technology and to keep up with its peers in the other industries.”
But in recent years, mounting pressures have changed that. The rise in chronic illness, the aging of the Baby Boomer population, and the shift to value-based care have pushed many organizations to rethink the way patients engage with their care and assess the role that health IT plays in that.
There have also been emerging challenges along the way, Shegewi noted, including managing the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and the vaccine rollout processes that followed.
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Amazon launches digital health accelerator with a focus on virtual care, analytics startups
Jun 21, 2021 1:03pm
Amazon Web Services wants to help incubate early-stage digital health companies that can collaborate with the tech giant's healthcare customers and partners.
Amazon's cloud division launched a healthcare accelerator to boost startups' growth in cloud technologies and enable early-stage companies to tap into AWS' technical and commercial expertise.
The program will focus on technologies such as remote patient monitoring, data analytics, patient engagement, voice technology and virtual care, according to a blog post from Sandy Carter, vice president of worldwide public sector partners and programs at AWS.
The AWS Healthcare Accelerator is a four-week program open to digital health startups based in the U.S. or ones that have existing U.S. operations and that have an established product-market fit with existing customers and revenue, according to AWS. Ten startups will participate in the inaugural program, with proposals due by July 23.
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Past, current ONC chiefs: Bipartisan work, industry collaboration yields successful health IT policy
by Dave Muoio
Jun 17, 2021 10:00am
The role of national coordinator for health IT comes with its fair share of policy constraints and budget limitations, but partisanship is one of the few Capitol Hill hurdles the office has managed to avoid over the past decade and a half.
In a recent College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) panel convening current National Coordinator Micky Tripathi, M.D., with six of his predecessors, the health IT leaders swapped stories about the challenges that came with guiding health IT policy through major periods of change.
Rob Kolodner, M.D., who held the role for two and a half years at the tail end of the George W. Bush administration, looked back fondly on his group’s work to develop the first federal health IT strategic plan. Doing so allowed the Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT (ONC) to keep its funding and persist from administration to administration, he said, although obtaining the necessary approvals forced his team to compromise on a familiar issue.
“We mourned the loss of one of the three goals we put in … that explicitly stated that patients should be able to reliably and securely exchange electronic health information with their providers and have access to their own personal health data,” he said. “That was a bridge too far at that time.”
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Jun 21, 2021,07:10am EDT|207 views
Tech Has Advanced Rapidly—And Cybersecurity Needs To Catch Up
Imagine this: You've moved to a new house in a new neighborhood, and on your first night, you forget to lock your doors and windows.
Now, that doesn't mean you'll get broken into. In fact, because it's only a single night, you'll probably be fine. However, the keyword is "probably" because you're not familiar with the area or your new neighbors. Although chances are everything will be fine, there's still a chance you'll wake up without a refrigerator.
That's the situation that businesses — especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) — find themselves in today.
Technology has come a long way over the course of the pandemic. Ten years of progress in 10 weeks is a phrase I hear used, and although that's a very rough estimate, the fact is the world looks completely different today compared to the early part of 2020.
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https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/emea/uk-government-announce-36m-ai-research-boost-nhs
UK government announce £36M AI research boost for NHS
Thirty-eight new AI projects have been announced as part of the NHS AI Lab's £140m AI in Health and Care Awards.
By Sara Mageit
June 21, 2021 07:55 AM
A share of £36 million to test 'state-of-the-art' AI technology has been invested in projects that aim to help the NHS transform the quality of care and the speed of diagnoses for conditions such as lung cancer.
At the CogX Festival last week, UK Health and Social Care secretary Matt Hancock announced the winners of the second wave of the NHS AI Lab’s AI in Health and Care Award. The 38 projects backed by NHSX and Accelerated Access Collaborative (AAC) include:
- An AI-guided tool to help doctors and nurses to diagnose heart attacks more accurately
- An algorithm to fast-track the detection of lung cancer
- An AI-powered mental health app to help tackle symptoms of anxiety and depression while also identifying people experiencing severe mental health difficulties
- Tech to help spot undiagnosed spinal fractures
WHY IT MATTERS
In September, £50 million was given to 42 AI technologies. Since then, over 17,000 stroke patients and over 25,000 patients with diabetes have benefitted from the first round of the AI in Health and Care Award.
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https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/senators-introduce-bipartisan-bill-fight-cybercrime
Senators introduce bipartisan bill to fight cybercrime
The International Cybercrime Prevention Act would create new criminal violations for those targeting hospitals and other critical infrastructure, among other provisions.
By Kat Jercich
June 21, 2021 10:32 AM
Colonial Pipeline that led to a days-long shutdown – a bipartisan group of senators has introduced a bill aimed at shoring up the country's defenses.
The International Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2021 would create new criminal violations for those targeting critical infrastructure, including hospitals.
"Over the last few months, we have seen the severity cybercrime attacks can have on our nation’s infrastructure, and it is time for Congress to ensure our cyber defense can withstand these attacks in the future," said Senator Thom Tillis, R-S.C., who cosponsored the bill, in a statement.
WHY IT MATTERS
The bill, which was also introduced by Senators Richard Blumenthal, D-Ct., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., aims to enhance the Department of Justice's authority around cybercrime.
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Jun 17 2021
HHS earmarks $80M from ARP for public health IT and better COVID-19 data collection
The effort is part of a broader push to address health and socioeconomic inequities that have been exacerbated by the pandemic.
Jeff Lagasse, Associate Editor
As part of the American Rescue Plan, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology is establishing an $80 million Public Health Informatics and Technology Workforce Development Program – dubbed the PHIT Workforce Program – in an effort to strengthen U.S. public health informatics and data science.
As part of the launch, ONC has invited colleges and universities to apply for funding through a consortium that will develop the curriculum, recruit and train participants, secure paid internship opportunities and assist in career placement at public health agencies, public health-focused non-profits or public health-focused private sector or clinical settings.
The focus will be on Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions (AANAPISIs), and other minority-serving institutions (MSIs).
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eSignatures and Digital Documents Matter Even More in a Post-COVID World
June 21, 2021
According to a recent study, COVID-19 has raised the expectations of patients when it comes to digital health. More patients than ever are willing to switch healthcare providers over a poor digital experience. Organizations that do not invest in getting rid of paper processes risk being left behind.
Embracing Digital
The pandemic has shown patients that paperless and contact-less healthcare is possible through telehealth, electronic communications and digital documents. According to a Health Affairs study 30.1% of all visits were done via telehealth from January to June 2020 – 23 times higher than the rate of telehealth usage pre-pandemic.
A recent survey also found that patients are now placing higher value on the overall digital experience they have with their healthcare provider:
- 65% say that they would be very likely to recommend a healthcare provider or write them a good review if they offer a great digital experience
- 53% of consumers would consider switching doctors to get touchless paperwork and virtual care, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic
- 41% want digital forms and communication
This trend towards a more digital healthcare experience is not new. For years we as consumers have seen digital improvements made in other industries like retail, banking, travel and even in our own workplaces that have resulted in easy, less frustrating interactions. There can be no doubt that we all want to see that same level of improvement in healthcare.
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Enjoy!
David.
