| | | |  By Casey Ross, Katie Palmer, Mario Aguilar, and Mohana Ravindranath | Hello from San Francisco, where your correspondents are still processing the insights and excitements of STAT’s Health Tech Summit, which wrapped up on Tuesday evening! Thank you to everyone who came or attended virtually and to our amazing events team who toiled for months to put it together! Missed it? Never fear! We’re using today’s newsletter to catch you up on the highlights. | | | Move slow and test things “Move fast and break things,” the infamous Facebook rallying cry, is the opposite of how tech companies ought to approach AI in health care, Google’s Greg Corrado told Casey onstage. “I think one of the things that is maybe less familiar in the tech industry is the idea of actually going slowly, actually building something that you think works and then not being totally sure of yourself, but measuring, testing,” said Corrado, senior research director at Google AI. “Try it. If you’re right, you’ll be able to move on to the next step, and the next step.” Among the important considerations is to ensure that AI is tested with data from populations where it will be used before its widely rolled out. Read Andrew Joseph’s story on the conversation here. | Apple women’s health study in focus Wellness data like sleep patterns, physical activity, and nutrition is rarely combined with conventional medical information, Apple physician Lauren Cheung said during the summit. That’s why the company decided to include such information in its women’s health study. “The possibilities are endless…We’re just scratching the surface,” she said.
There’s currently far too little information about menstrual cycles, even though most physicians consider it a vital sign. Stigma certainly plays a role, said Cheung: “It was only a few decades ago that women were allowed to participate in research.” Apple, in collaboration with Harvard and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, currently has over 70,000 people enrolled in its menstrual tracking study, with plans to monitor participants for at least a decade. | Standing up for patient privacy As a STAT investigation published Monday revealed, data brokers are quietly trafficking in Americans’ health information — often without their knowledge or consent, and beyond the reach of federal health privacy laws. In a panel at the summit, Andrea Downing, co-founder of the Light Collective — a group of patient communities advocating for digital rights — said there’s a need to consider updating or replacing HIPAA to restore privacy to the modern health information ecosystem. To her, patients need to have a say in how datasets are used — her group’s guiding principle is “no aggregation without representation.” “We’re thinking less in terms of ownership — ownership is a bad framework because data can be replicated in so many different ways,” Downing said. “But we have to get ahead of the bad uses and we do that with representation in governance structures of patient communities that are affected by those data.” Read Megan Molteni’s story here. | A 360 view of Pfizer’s landmark Biohaven acquisition Pfizer announced the M&A event of the year with its $11.6B Biohaven acquisition. Top investors turned to Tegus to learn more through on-demand insight Nurtec’s trajectory, Biohaven’s leadership, and the competitive environment. Tegus hosts thousands of 1:1 conversations with top physicians, industry executives, and custom-sourced KOLs, so primary research is just a click away. See for yourself with a free Tegus trial. | Other highlights - Rajeev Ronanki, Anthem’s president of digital platforms, said the health insurer is building a symptom checker for members that’s designed to act as a more helpful alternative to Google. He’s leading an effort to harness almost 200 million claims per year into a self-service tool that will help users learn what worked for others with the same ailments. “The convenience of saying, ‘I have this, let me text the doc and resolve it over the course of 30 minutes while I work or do something else,” Ronanki said. “That’s something we were able to introduce and scale and connect all the dots.”
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In conversation with STAT’s Isa Cueto, Amazon’s principal accessibility researcher Joshua Miele highlighted the many ways health care and health tech fails to include people with disabilities. “I think of the medical system as one of the most ableist institutions we still have,” said Miele, a MacArthur genius who builds devices for blind and visually impaired people. “Why is it so hard to buy a talking glucometer … a talking blood pressure cuff?” he asked. Isa has more on the session. -
Google’s chief health officer Karen DeSalvo — formerly the federal government’s top health IT official under President Obama — emphasized the search giant’s focus on serving consumers the most accurate and up-to-date health information. “Monkeypox comes on the scene, the first thing that comes into my mind is OK, well, what are the myths and the harmful things that might begin to perpetuate that we want to look for,” she told STAT’s Rick Berke. Among steps Google took: pushing sites rife with misinformation to the bottom of search results and promoting content from the CDC. Jason Mast has more. | | | What we’re reading - Key Senate panel wants to ax in-person requirement for telemental health services, STAT
- CVS halts controlled substance prescriptions for telehealth vendors Cerebral and Done, Wall Street Journal
- No low-hanging fruit: Experts pitch their four big ideas for changing health care, STAT
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