Researchers Fret as Social Media Lift Veil on Drug Trials

Drug makers and researchers are increasingly concerned that online chatter could unravel the carefully built construct of the clinical trial, and perhaps put patients in danger. They worry that patients may drop out if they suspect they aren't getting the drug being tested, or may report symptoms inaccurately because of the influence or suggestions of others in the trial.

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Originally published in The Wall Street Journal

FDA Regulation of Mobile Health Technologies

Medicine may stand at the cusp of a mobile transformation. Mobile health, or “mHealth,” is the use of portable devices such as smartphones and tablets for medical purposes, including diagnosis, treatment, or support of general health and well-being. Users can interface with mobile devices through software applications (“apps”) that typically gather input from interactive questionnaires, separate medical devices connected to the mobile device, or functionalities of the device itself, such as its camera, motion sensor, or microphone. Apps may even process these data with the use of medical algorithms or calculators to generate customized diagnoses and treatment recommendations. Mobile devices make it possible to collect more granular patient data than can be collected from devices that are typically used in hospitals or physicians' offices. The experiences of a single patient can then be measured against large data sets to provide timely recommendations about managing both acute symptoms and chronic conditions.

Full report here

Originally published in The New England Journal of Medicine

Should You Trust Health Apps on Your Phone?

Personal health is becoming increasingly mobile, and there are now thousands of apps aiming to address everything from lifestyle issues to chronic diseases. But can you trust these apps, the same way you trust your prescribed drugs and medical devices?

Medical devices are generally regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and although the FDA  reviews some apps, experts say the agency's power and efforts aren't nearly enough to cover the 97,000 and counting health apps out there that are transforming consumer health.

"The FDA is woefully understaffed and under-resourced to oversee these things, particularly given the number of the thousands of apps that are [most likely] under FDA's jurisdiction," said health law expert Nathan Cortez, an associate professor of law at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law in Dallas, Texas.

In an editorial published in The New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday (July 24), Cortez and his colleagues argued that health and medical apps hold the promise of improving health, reducing medical errors, avoiding costly interventions, and broadening access to care. But to reach their potential, these products have to be safe and effective, they said.

via livescience.

Link of the full article here. 

Behind the Machine's Back: How Social Media Users Avoid Getting Turned Into Big Data

Social media companies constantly collect data on their users because that's how they provide customized experiences and target their advertisements. All Twitter and Facebook users know this, and there is a broad array of feelings about how good or bad the persistent tracking of their social relationships is. What we do know, though, is that—when they want to—they are aware of how to go behind the machine's back. They know how to communicate with just the humans without tipping their intentions to the algorithm.

Originally Published in The Atlantic

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Is Facebook Linked to Selfishness? Investigating the Relationships among Social Media Use, Empathy, and Narcissism

The rise of social networking sites have led to changes in the nature of our social relationships, as well as how we present and perceive ourselves. The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship among the following in adults: use of a highly popular social networking site—Facebook, empathy, and narcissism. 

The findings indicated that some Facebook activities, such as chatting, were linked to aspects of empathic concern, such as higher levels of Perspective Taking in males. The Photo feature in Facebook was also linked to better ability to place themselves in fictional situations. For only the females, viewing videos was associated with the extent to which they could identify with someone’s distress. The data also indicated that certain aspects of Facebook use, such as the photo feature, were linked to narcissism. However, the overall pattern of findings suggests that social media is primarily a tool for staying connected, than for self-promotion.

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Originally published in Social Networking

Changes in Office Visit Use Associated With Electronic Messaging and Telephone Encounters Among Patients With Diabetes in the PCMH

Telephone- and Internet-based communication are increasingly common in primary care, yet there is uncertainty about how these forms of communication affect demand for in-person office visits. We assessed whether use of copay-free secure messaging and telephone encounters was associated with office visit use in a population with diabetes.

The study, which included 18,486 adults with diabetes, found that before and after a medical home redesign, proportional increases in secure messaging and telephone encounters were associated with additional primary care office visits for individuals with diabetes. The findings provide evidence on how new forms of patient-clinician communication may affect demand for office visits.

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Originally published in Annals of Family Medicine

Big Data Peeps At Your Medical Records to Find Drug Problems

Big Data Peeps At Your Medical Records to Find Drug Problems

No one likes it when a new drug in people's medicine cabinets turns out to have problems — just remember the Vioxx debacle a decade ago, when the painkiller was removed from the market over concerns that it increased the risk of heart attack and stroke.

To do a better job of spotting unforeseen risks and side effects, the Food and Drug Administration is trying something new — and there's a decent chance that it involves your medical records.

Via NPR Health News

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One of a Kind: What do you do if your child has a condition that is new to science?

Matt Might and Cristina Casanova met in the spring of 2002, as twenty-year-old undergraduates at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Cristina was an industrial-design major with an interest in philosophy; Matt was a shy computer geek obsessed with “Star Trek.” At first, Cristina took no notice of him, but the two soon became friends, and that fall they began dating. Within a year, they were married.

The couple had their first child, a son, on December 9, 2007, not long after Matt completed his Ph.D. in computer science and Cristina earned her M.B.A. They named him Bertrand, in honor of the British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell. After a few blissful weeks, the new parents began to worry. Matt and Cristina described Bertrand to friends as being “jiggly”; his body appeared always to be in motion, as if he were lying on a bed of Jell-O. He also seemed to be in near-constant distress, and Matt’s efforts to comfort him “just enraged him,” Matt says. “I felt like a failure as a father.” When the Mights raised their concerns with Bertrand’s doctor, they were assured that his development was within normal variations. Not until Bertrand’s six-month checkup did his pediatrician agree that there was cause for concern.

via The New Yorker

Link to full article here.

The App That Lets You Spy on Yourself and Sell Your Own Data

Facebook and other social networking sites aren’t free. They don’t charge you money to connect with friends, upload photos, and “like” your favorite bands and businesses, but you still pay. You pay with your personal data, which these service use to target ads.

For Citizenme, the price you pay is much higher, and it’s trying to shift internet economics back in your direction. The long-term plan is to provide a way for you to sell your own online data directly to advertisers and others of your choosing. But it isn’t there just yet. In the meantime, it’s focused on helping you collect and analyze your social media data through a mobile app that connects to multiple social networks—giving you more insight into how things work today. “The very first step is raising awareness, helping people understand what’s being done with their data,” says Citizenme founder StJohn Deakins.

Originally Published in Wired

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Will Video Kill the Classroom Star? The Threat and Opportunity of MOOCs for Full-time MBA Programs

New research by Christian Terwiesch, Andrew M. Heller Professor and Co-director of the Mack Institute, and Karl Ulrich, CIBC Endowed Professor and Vice Dean of Innovation at the Wharton School, examines the emergence of the Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) and its impact on business schools. 

Prior to the 20th century, entertainment was predominantly delivered via live performances. The advent of motion pictures fundamentally altered the entertainment industry: Why go and see a local clown in the town square if you can watch one of the best in the world on the big screen? With the advent of online instructional technology, will classroom instruction undergo a similar transformation?

Link to the full interview

Originally published on Wharton.upenn.edu 

An Actually Useful Version of Yo Is Warning Israelis of Rocket Strikes

Ridiculed for being gimmicky and useless, the app that was released on April Fool’s Day is now being used to save lives in one of the planet’s most complex conflict zones. Israeli citizens have begun relying on Yo for warnings of impending rocket strikes by Palestinian militants.

The messaging app has partnered with Red Alert, a real-time missile notification service and self-described “propaganda tool” used in Israel. Following the implementation of the Red Color emergency siren system in 2012, there were concerns that people might not hear—or even sleep through—the sirens. Red Alert acts as a complement to the sirens. Yo users can now follow “RedAlertIsrael” to get a “Yo” at the same time that the sirens go off. The user typically receives a warning via smartphone 15 to 90 seconds before a rocket hits.

Without Yo, the Red Alert app simply sends an alert (audio optional) with a potential city-wide location, like Jerusalem or Ashkelon. Working in conjunction with Yo’s push notification service, Red Alert is able to reach a larger pool of citizens who might be vulnerable to rocket fire near Gaza. It’s quickly becoming one of the most popular apps in Israel.

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Originally published on Wired

Novartis and Google to Work on Smart Contact Lenses

Eyewear Will Monitor Blood-Sugar Levels for Diabetics

Novartis and Google Inc. are joining forces to work on a smart contact lens that monitors blood-sugar levels and corrects vision in a new way, the latest in a series of technology products designed to monitor body functions.

On Monday, the two companies said Novartis's Alcon eye-care division would license and commercialize "smart lens" technology designed by Google[x], a development team at the search engine giant. Financial details of the partnership weren't provided.

The smart lenses, which Google unveiled in January, are part of a growing number of wearable technology and software products used to monitor health and fitness. 

Link to the full article

Originally published in the The Wall Street Journal

Survey: 1 in 3 fitness tracker owners stopped using them this past year

Two recent surveys, one from activity tracker maker Withings and the other from research firm IDC Health Insights asked consumers about their engagement with connected health devices.

In the IDC survey, the research firm found that one out of three consumers who own fitness trackers stopped using their devices in the past 12 months. IDC adds that to maintain consumers’ engagement with these devices, there needs to be more education on the benefits of health devices and activity trackers.

Originally published on MobiHealthNews

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Tweet Your Way to Better Health

Twitter and other social media should be better utilized to convey public health messages, especially to young adults, according to a new analysis by researchers at UC San Francisco.

The analysis focused on public conversations on the social media site Twitter around one health issue: indoor tanning beds, which are associated with an increased risk of skin cancer. The researchers assessed the frequency of Twitter mentions related to indoor tanning and tanning health risks during a two week period in 2013. During that timeframe, more than 154,000 tweets (English language) mentioned indoor tanning – amounting to 7.7 tweets per minute. But fewer than 10 percent mentioned any of the health risks, such as skin cancer, that have been linked to indoor tanning.

That offers a potentially valuable forum for conveying important health information directly to the people who might benefit the most from it, but the authors said further research is needed to explore whether that would be effective.  

via UCSF.

Link to original article here.

HealthCare.gov site stumps 'highly educated' millennials

Millennials who struggled to sign up for health insurance on HealthCare.gov have some simple advice for the Obama administration: Make the website more like Yelp or TurboTax.

President Obama famously told doubters that they could use the government’s health insurance site to pick a health plan "the same way you shop for a plane ticket on Kayak, same way you shop for a TV on Amazon." Speaking at a community college in Maryland last fall, he promised that the process was “real simple.”

That turned out not to be the case, of course. A study published Monday by Annals of Internal Medicine lays out some of the specific ways that HealthCare.gov – a centerpiece of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – went wrong.

Originally published in the Los Angeles Times

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Emergency room online appointments ease wait times

Scott Paul knew he needed to head to the emergency room on a recent Sunday after his foot became so painful he couldn't walk. The one thing that gave him pause was the thought of having to wait several hours next to a bunch of sick people.

But his wife, Jeannette, remembered she'd seen Dignity Health television commercials featuring a woman sitting in a hospital waiting room and then cutting to the same woman sitting on her living room couch as words come up on the screen: "Wait for the ER from home."

"I've been in emergency rooms before, so I thought I'd see if this worked out," she said, and went online to book an appointment for her husband at Dignity's St. Mary's Medical Center in San Francisco.

Originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle 

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A Bright Side to Facebook’s Experiments on Its Users

Facebook’s disclosure last week that it had tinkered with about 700,000 users’ news feeds as part of a psychology experiment conducted in 2012 inadvertently laid bare what too few tech firms acknowledge: that they possess vast powers to closely monitor, test and even shape our behavior, often while we’re in the dark about their capabilities.

The publication of the study, which found that showing people slightly happier messages in their feeds caused them to post happier updates, and sadder messages prompted sadder updates, ignited a torrent of outrage from people who found it creepy that Facebook would play with unsuspecting users’ emotions. Because the study was conducted in partnership with academic researchers, it also appeared to violate long-held rules protecting people from becoming test subjects without providing informed consent. Several European privacy agencies have begun examining whether the study violated local privacy laws.

Originally published in the New York Times

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Why Computers Won’t Be Replacing You Just Yet

Three computer scientists, Chenhao Tan, Lillian Lee and Bo Pang, have built an algorithm that also makes these guesses, as described in a recent paper, and the results are impressive. You can think of the pair of Gore tweets as a practice round for a 25-question quiz that The Upshot has created based on their algorithm. (The answer: Gore’s first tweet got more retweets). That an algorithm can make these kinds of predictions shows the power of “big data.” It also illustrates a fundamental limitation of big data: Specifically, guessing which tweet gets retweeted is significantly easier than creating one that gets retweeted.

Originally published in the New York Times

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Facebook Study Sparks Soul-Searching and Ethical Questions

A Facebook study on users' emotions sparked soul-searching among researchers and calls for better ethical guidelines in the online world.

"I do think this whole incident will cause a lot of rethinking" about the relationship between business and academic researchers, said Susan T. Fiske, the study's editor and a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University.

Researchers from Facebook and Cornell University manipulated the news feed of nearly 700,000 Facebook users for a week in 2012 to gauge whether emotions spread on social media.

They found that users who saw more positive posts tended to write more positive posts themselves, and vice versa. The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier in June, but sparked outrage after a blog post Friday said the study used Facebook users as "lab rats." 

[...]

Jonathan Moreno, a professor of medical ethics and health policy at University of Pennsylvania, also criticized the study. "You are sending people whose emotional state you don't know anything about communications that they might find disturbing," Dr. Moreno said. "That might or might not be something a research ethics board would worry about." 

via The Wall Street Journal

Link to full article here.

Medical Boards Draft Plan to Ease Path to Out-of-State and Online Treatment

Officials representing state medical boards across the country have drafted a model law that would make it much easier for doctors licensed in one state to treat patients in other states, whether in person, by video conference or online.

The plan, representing the biggest change in medical licensing in decades, opens the door to greater use of telemedicine and could alleviate the doctor shortage, a growing problem as millions of people gain insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

The draft legislation — in the form of an interstate compact, a legally binding agreement among states — was developed by the Federation of State Medical Boards, composed of the agencies that license and discipline doctors.

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Originally Published in The New York Times