Assisted living managers say an algorithm prevented hiring enough staff; The Washington Post, April 1, 2024

Douglas MacMillan

 and 

Christopher Rowland

, The Washington Post; Assisted living managers say an algorithm prevented hiring enough staff

"Two decades ago, a group of senior-housing executives came up with a way to raise revenue and reduce costs at assisted-living homes. Using stopwatches, they timed caregivers performing various tasks, from making beds to changing soiled briefs, and fed the information into a program they began using to determine staffing.

Brookdale Senior Living, the leading operator of senior homes with 652 facilities, acquired the algorithm-based system and used it to set staffing at its properties across the nation. But as Brookdale’s empire grew, employees complained the system, known as “Service Alignment,” failed to capture the nuances of caring for vulnerable seniors, documents and interviews show."

The Challenges and Benefits of Generative AI in Health Care; Harvard Business Review, January 17, 2024

Harvard Business Review, Azeem Azhar's Exponential View / Season 6, Episode 58; The Challenges and Benefits of Generative AI in Health Care

"Artificial Intelligence is on every business leader’s agenda. How do we make sense of the fast-moving new developments in AI over the past year? Azeem Azhar returns to bring clarity to leaders who face a complicated information landscape.

Generative AI has a lot to offer health care professionals and medical scientists. This week, Azeem speaks with renowned cardiologist, scientist, and author Eric Topol about the change he’s observed among his colleagues in the last two years, as generative AI developments have accelerated in medicine.

They discuss:

• The challenges and benefits of AI in health care.
• The pros and cons of different open-source and closed-source models for health care use.
• The medical technology that has been even more transformative than AI in the past year."

Senator wants Google to answer for accuracy, ethics of generative AI tool; HealthcareITNews, August 9, 2023

 Mike Miliard, HealthcareITNews; Senator wants Google to answer for accuracy, ethics of generative AI tool

"Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, wrote a letter to Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent company Alphabet, on Aug. 8, seeking clarity into the technology developer's Med-PaLM 2, an artificial intelligence chatbot, and how it's being deployed and trained in healthcare settings."

Drones get blood to patients faster—and reduce waste; The University of British Columbia, March 21, 2022

The University of British Columbia; Drones get blood to patients faster—and reduce waste

"Prompt blood delivery can be lifesaving for people who need transfusions for emergencies such as postpartum hemorrhage, severe malaria, or traumatic injuries. However, only a few facilities in Rwanda are able to collect and store blood, posing a serious risk for people who don’t live near distribution centers...

In 2016, Rwanda became the first African country to integrate drone deliveries into its healthcare system. The project is a partnership between the Government of Rwanda and California-based robotics company Zipline Inc.

Currently, the program is focused mainly on blood deliveries. However, the project has started to expand the deliveries of vaccines and essential medicines for the treatment of diseases such as HIV/AIDS, COVID-19, malaria, and tuberculosis.

While most studies to this point have focused on feasibility, the new paper from Nisingizwe and her team is one of the first to measure actual outcomes. Next, the researchers want to determine whether drone delivery improves health outcomes and is ultimately cost-effective, and explore its potential for transporting other perishable health products and medicines.

“Drone technology has tremendous potential to improve access to care for people living in rural and remote areas, not just in Rwanda, but all around the world,” said Dr. Michael Law, a professor in UBC’s Centre for Health Services and Policy Research and senior author on the study.

Drone delivery is being explored as a potential healthcare solution in other countries, including in British Columbia, where a UBC-led study is exploring the feasibility of using drones to transport medical supplies between Stellat’en First Nation and the Village of Fraser Lake."

Their DNA Hides a Warning, but They Don’t Want to Know What It Says; The New York Times, January 21, 2022

 Gina Kolata, The New York Times ; Their DNA Hides a Warning, but They Don’t Want to Know What It Says

"Benjamin Berkman, a bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health, said that, in his view, the benefits of telling participants about genetic findings that can be treated or prevented greatly outweighed the risk that the participants might be frightened or fail to follow up.

“These are important pieces of information that can be lifesaving,” he said.

But not all biobanks give subjects the chance to receive health warnings.

At Vanderbilt, Dr. Clayton said, she volunteered genetic information to a biobank whose participants have been de-identified — all names and other personal information are stripped from the data. It also has other protections to prevent individuals in the bank from being found. While she happily contributed to the research, Dr. Clayton said, she is glad her data can’t be traced and that no one will call her if they find something that may be worrying.

“I don’t want to know,” she said."

How the intellectual property monopoly has impeded an effective response to Covid-19; The Conversation, February 14, 2022

 Salam Alshareef; The Conversation ; How the intellectual property monopoly has impeded an effective response toCovid-19

"As of October 2021, only 0.7% of all manufactured vaccine doses had gone to low-income countries. Manufacturers had delivered 47 times as many doses to high-income countries as they had to low-income countries.

Since its inception, COVAX, the UN-backed initiative dedicated to promoting access to Covid vaccines, has struggled to obtain doses. It recently passed the 1 billion doses delivered – half way to its goal of delivering 2 billion doses by the end of 2021. Indeed, AstraZeneca, Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson have delivered between 0% and 39% of their already inadequate commitments to COVAX in 2021.

The Global Commission for Post-Pandemic Policy, meanwhile, estimates that while Asia and Europe will be able to fully vaccinate 80% of their populations by March 2022 and North America by May 2022, Africa will not reach 80% at current rates until April 2025."

Privacy experts alarmed as Amazon moves into the health care industry; Washington Post, January 30, 2018

Abha Bhattarai, Washington Post; Privacy experts alarmed as Amazon moves into the health care industry

"Amazon.com on Tuesday announced a joint partnership with Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan to create an independent health-care company for their employees, putting an end to months of speculation that the technology giant was eyeing a foray into the medical industry. It’s yet another endeavor for the company, which last year spent $13.7 billion to enter the grocery business with its acquisition of Whole Foods Market. (Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, also owns The Washington Post.)

[Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan Chase join forces to tackle employees’ health-care costs]

But as the online retailer expands into new industries — cloud computing, drones, tech gadgets, moviemaking and now health care — some privacy experts say the company’s increasingly dominant role in our lives raises concerns about how personal data is collected and used. What happens, for example, when a company that has access to our weekly shopping lists, eating habits and in-home Alexa-based assistants also becomes involved in our medical care?"