| | | |   | Good morning. Mario here with insights from my colleague Casey Ross’ excellent event yesterday. Also, a reminder that our very best stories often come from tips. If you know something I should know, please reach out: mario.aguilar@statnews.com | | | Magnetic stimulation for Alzhiemer’s zaps forward The quest for a non-drug intervention to treat Alzheimer’s continues: A Phase II study, testing whether magnetic stimulation to the precuneus brain region can slow the progression of the disease showed encouraging results newly published in Brain. The blinded, randomized control trial compared a group that received a 24-week course of brain stimulation to a group that received a sham. After the short course, those who received the treatment showed “stable” performance on the commonly used CDR-SB scale, while those who received the sham showed worsening performance. | Does adding context to EHRs improve clinical care? Clinicians are trained to identify relevant information about patient’s lives when designing care plans, but in practice, these so-called contextual factors often are not addressed. A study sought to determine whether a clinical decision support tool that surfaced contextual factors drawn from patient questionnaires and information extracted from medical records would improve care. The study documented 452 visits. The results, published this week in JAMA Network Open, found that the tools did not improve patient outcomes compared to standard care. The upside, the authors write is that the tools did “increase the likelihood that a physician would address relevant patient life context in their care plan.” | HIPAA rules keep patients from their data  That's what Yasnoff, an adjunct professor of biomedical informatics and data science, told Casey Ross yesterday in a discussion about health data privacy. HIPAA — held up as the way to protect patient privacy — has instead for years locked patients out of their own health records. The law allows commercial data brokers collect the data of hundreds of millions of people, while it remains hard for individual patients to pull or transfer their own data, or consent to how it is being used. | How will AI transform the future of medicine? Artificial intelligence (AI) is solving many of humanity’s problems at a pace that far exceeds the limitations of human intelligence. In medicine, for example, AI is aiding more accurate diagnoses and enabling smaller, faster clinical trials. Experts say we’re only at the beginning of realizing this technology’s full potential. To learn how AI will transform the future of medicine, don’t miss this Endpoints webinar featuring Unlearn’s founder and AI researcher, Charles Fisher. Register now. | Industry news -
Verily announced its teaming up with the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation to create a new registry of patients with inflammatory bowel disease, which will be used to find patients for clinical trials. -
Evidation launched FluSmart, a voluntary program which will use wearable data and self-reported information to alert users of its app when it detects a change that may reflect flu-like symptoms. Users will then be prompted to complete a symptom survey and may be directed to resources or clinical studies. -
School-based telehealth company Hazel raised $51 million in funding. The firm provides physical and mental health services in 3,000 schools in 14 states. - Color Health announced it’s branching into behavioral health care and that it's acquiring Mood Lifters, a “a leading group-based mental health company.”
| What we're reading -
California sees increase in RSV, a respiratory illness that can be dangerous for babies, Los Angeles Times -
Cyber experts hope CommonSpirit's crippling attack will spur hospitals to tighten defenses—and government to play offense, Fierce Healthcare - When it comes to addiction, Americans’ word choices are part of the problem, STAT
| | | Thanks to STAT’s Jayne Williamson-Lee for contributing to today’s edition, and thanks for reading! More next week,  | |
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