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Good morning! Casey Ross here filling in for Mario, who’s attending a fellowship this week. It’s a newsy edition, with plenty from Elon Musk, who ended Twitter’s policing of Covid-19 misinformation and provided an update on his brain-computer interface company Neuralink. If that’s too much Elon, no worries. We’ve got plenty of quick hits on EHR vendors, health data aggregators, and more. |
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Elon Musk says Neuralink is nearing human studies The secretive brain-machine interface startup Neuralink hopes to enter human studies in the next six months, co-founder Elon Musk said during a live-streamed "show and tell" event last night. Musk also laid out the company's lofty initial goals: to use its technology to treat vision loss and enable more function for people with restore some function for people who are unable to move their muscles. The company's first target in that space, Musk said, is to make it possible for people to control smartphones or other devices with their brains — but ultimately, he said the company believes it can restore movement.
Those goals, of course, are easier said than done, and Neuralink faces an uncertain and challenging path forward. But human studies will mark a notable step — and Musk said the company has submitted most of its paperwork to the FDA to get those trials underway. Mohana and Katie have more. |
Data broker shuts down media access to drug info The health data aggregator Merative told STAT it is shutting down free data access for media outlets. The private equity-backed company, formed from the ashes of IBM’s Watson Health division, said it will no longer provide journalists with pricing changes for specific medicines. Prior owners of the datasets Merative now controls offered such details to reporters trying to cover the drug industry at a time of rapidly rising prescription drug prices.
But a spokesperson said providing such information could alienate pharmaceutical companies that are also its clients. “It could affect our relationship with them and it’s really important to maintain the quality of our products,” she explained. “It’s really because we’re a new company and we’re looking at everything (and) re-evaluating all the ways that we do business.” But ethicists said that change could also further undermine transparency into industry practices and how patients’ data are being used in support of commercial interests. I have the story along with STAT's Ed Silverman — read more. |
Tech to the rescue — not so much It sounds like a life-saver: Give volunteers a smartphone app pointing to nearby defibrillators (AEDs), and they’ll use the devices to help more people who suffer out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. Well…a randomized trial in Sweden determined that use of the app, called Heatrunner, did not meaningfully increase use of AEDs by volunteers. The study authors concluded that while the app might not have increased AED use, using a system to dispatch trained volunteers to the site of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests is an important complement to typical EMS systems. |
Rethink how you deploy your infection preventionists Could your Infection Preventionists (IPs) benefit from more time to focus on their prevention duties? Discover how remote surveillance support from certified IPs can help augment your team. Learn more. |
Tweet of the week 
Twitter’s decision to stop enforcing its Covid-19 misinformation policy has sparked an outcry among public health researchers, while leading spreaders of misinformation about the virus celebrated the move. “A win for free speech and medical freedom!” tweeted Simone Gold, who frequently attacks Anthony Fauci and raises false alarms about Covid-19 vaccines.
Starting in 2020, Twitter began labeling posts containing Covid-19 misinformation and often provided additional context or corrective information. It also removed false or misleading tweets and suspended some accounts. Elon Musk tweeted that ending the policy was necessary to protect free speech, but many experts argued that the spread of misinformation has harmed Twitter’s users and fueled the pandemic. |
Industry news - EHR vendor Athenahealth is looking to go public — again. Just 10 months after being scooped up by the private equity firm Bain Capital, the company is eyeing a return to the markets, according to the Boston Globe. Athenahealth, which first went public in 2007, has ditched its hospital business to focus on software for smaller medical practices.
- A federal appeals court has ruled that Oracle Cerner should stand trial in a lawsuit that alleges the company’s software caused a patient’s brain damage. The suit filed by the grandmother of Michael Taylor argues that he suffered brain damage after he didn’t receive continuous pulse oximetry ordered by his physician due to defects in the EHR.
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Q&A: How a new 'voice' in the EHR creates a fuller picture of patients with disabilities EHRs can only do so much to capture the complexities of living with a disability — but technologies like natural language processing can help. STAT spoke with Amy Houtrow, a pediatric rehabilitation doctor and professor at the University of Pittsburgh, about how these tools amplify the voices of people with disabilities in medical records.
You and your colleagues recently published an article on using NLP to create a more complete picture of patients with disabilities’ experiences. How might it help?
When I take care of kids, they often tell very elaborate stories. I’m a rehabilitation doctor and might ask about, you know, how are things going with your walking and that might not show up very evidently in this like two-paragraph story that they just started telling me about what happened at the playground, so natural language processing can help us pull out information that’s relevant and more specific.
Why is it challenging to capture that level of nuance?
The more voice that we can give patients in our medical records, I think, the better. No one is a better expert on themselves than the person themselves. We often do not have enough of that expertise placed into our medical record. If you read medical records, they’re often very dry. They don’t have a lot of nuance or explanation, and that’s for efficiency… So it’s like balancing what makes clinical care as efficient as possible with what helps us really understand what’s going on for individuals with disabilities. |
Personnel File - The AI drug discovery company Insitro tapped Philip Tagari to be its chief scientific officer. Tagari spent the last 24 years at Amgen, where he led the company’s research platforms.
- Privya, a data privacy startup, appointed Peter Swire to its executive advisory board. Swire previously served as an adviser on privacy and cyberlaw issues to Presidents Clinton and Obama.
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What we're reading - A new use for dating apps: chasing STIs, Kaiser Health News
- 40 million Americans’ health data is stolen or exposed each year. See if your provider has been breached, USA Today
- ‘This actually changes everything’: Altered image in 1999 paper raises potential peril for Stanford president, STAT
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Thanks for reading — more next week! |
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