Group items tagged

"Each of these community health workers typically works with 100 families, and they used to hand-deliver patient updates to doctors by foot. But by equipping these individuals with $10 cellphones, Medic Mobile helped to create a hub-and-spoke model of health care that's revolutionized the way millions of people get well."

"As hospitals face a surge in patients and critical equipment shortages stemming from the coronavirus pandemic, they are increasingly becoming the target of hackers who see health care facilities as easy prey. Ransomware attacks, in which hackers lock up a network and demand payment to return access to these systems, have presented a growing threat to hospitals since January. "

"A widely used algorithm that predicts which patients will benefit from extra medical care dramatically underestimates the health needs of the sickest black patients, amplifying long-standing racial disparities in medicine, researchers have found."

"Can AI and analytics be used in a way that improves operational efficiency without jeopardizing our ethical principles? The answer is "yes" - if moral objectives and constraints, now often treated as an afterthought, are considered from the outset when designing models. We will discuss a recent attempt to combine ethics, analytics, and operational efficiency in the world of organ allocation and examine the lessons it holds for other areas of health care and beyond."

Interoperability in the healthcare system is the gateway to a successful healthcare information exchange. It has excellent benefits like it improves clinical decision-making and reduces time wasting. However, even though there are many attempts to implement the policy, interoperability still has barriers that stop it from success. There are still some third parties that use this for financial gains. Also, the people struggle with the technical and practical challenges of the protocol. Plus, privacy and trust are not truly gained in terms of the privacy and security of those data exchanges.

"The concept of robotic fabric is that of a soft exoskeleton or muscle tissue made out of electronic sensors and shape-memory alloys, all woven and configured into a cotton material. The end result is a sort of "skin" that can be placed around deformable materials that give the "robot" its shape."

"Now, by my estimates, the half-life of a career is about 10 years. I expect that it will decrease, within a decade, to five years. Advancing technologies will cause so much disruption to almost every industry that entire professions will disappear. And then, in about 15-20 years from now, we will be facing a jobless future, in which most jobs are done by machines and the cost of basic necessities such as food, energy and health care is negligible - just as the costs of cellphone communications and information are today. "

"A draft government memo explaining how the NHS contact-tracing app could stem the spread of the coronavirus said ministers might be given the ability to order "de-anonymisation" to identify people from their smartphones, the Guardian can reveal. The health secretary, Matt Hancock, announced on Sunday that the UK planned to introduce an app that would enable people who developed Covid-19 symptoms to "anonymously" alert other users to whom they had been in close proximity. "All data will be handled according to the highest ethical and security standards, and would only be used for NHS care and research," he said."

"But historically, these tools have been put into use only after a rigorous peer review of the raw data and statistical analyses used to develop them. Epic's Deterioration Index, on the other hand, remains proprietary despite its widespread deployment. Although physicians are provided with a list of the variables used to calculate the index and a rough estimate of each variable's impact on the score, we aren't allowed under the hood to evaluate the raw data and calculations. "

"The battle over algorithms in healthcare has come into full view since last fall. The debate only intensified in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, which has disproportionately devastated Black and Latino communities. In October, Science published a study that found one hospital unintentionally directed more white patients than Black patients to a high-risk care management program because it used an algorithm to predict the patients' future healthcare costs as a key indicator of personal health. Optum, the company that sells the software product, told Mashable that the hospital used the tool incorrectly. "

"The app, called Care19, and produced by a company called ProudCrowd that also makes a location-based social networking app for North Dakota State sports fans, generates a random ID number for each person who uses it. Then, it can "anonymously cache the individual's locations throughout the day," storing information about where people spent at least 10 minutes at a time, according to the state website. If users test positive for the coronavirus, they can provide that information to the North Dakota Department of Health for contact-tracing purposes so that other people who spent time near virus patients can potentially be notified."

"Service providers, including many ORG members, will be required to do this through the imposition of a "duty of care" - a concept awkwardly borrowed from health & safety - which will require them to monitor the integrity of their services not by objective technical standards, but by subjective "codes of practice" on both illegal and legal content. Although the framework has been drawn up with large American social media platforms in mind, it would apply to any site or service with UK users which hosts user-generated content. A blog with comments will be fair game. An app with user reviews will be fair game. "

"Privacy campaigners say the plan for the regional centres revives talk of "pseudonymised information" being extracted from medical records. That refers to a process whereby some personal identifiers are removed but not enough to make information completely anonymous."