Month: April 2018

Facebook Should ‘First Do No Harm’ When Collecting Health Data

Mason Marks Leave a comment

By Mason Marks

Following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it was reported that Facebook planned to partner with medical organizations to obtain health records on thousands of users. The plans were put on hold when news of the scandal broke. But Facebook doesn’t need medical records to derive health data from its users. It can use artificial intelligence tools, such as machine learning, to infer sensitive medical information from its users’ behavior. I call this process mining for emergent medical data (EMD), and companies use it to sort consumers into health-related categories and serve them targeted advertisements. I will explain how mining for EMD is analogous to the process of medical diagnosis performed by physicians, and companies that engage in this activity may be practicing medicine without a license.

Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress about his company’s data collection practices. Many lawmakers that questioned him understood that Facebook collects consumer data and uses it to drive targeted ads. However, few Members of Congress seemed to understand that the value of data often lies not in the information itself, but in the inferences that can be drawn from it. There are numerous examples that illustrate how health information is inferred from the behavior of social media users: Last year Facebook announced its reliance on artificial intelligence to predict which users are at high risk for suicide; a leaked document revealed that Facebook identified teens feeling “anxious” and “hopeless;” and data scientists used Facebook messages and “likes” to predict whether users had substance use disorders. In 2016, researchers analyzed Instagram posts to predict whether users were depressed. In each of these examples, user data was analyzed to sort people into health-related categories.

Read More

New Article Examines the Possibility of Applying Workplace Safety Rules to the NFL

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

Part of the Law and Ethics Initiative of the Football Players Health Study at Harvard University: Article authored by Adam M. Finkel, Chris Deubert, Orly Lobel, I. Glenn Cohen (Faculty Director), and Holly Fernandez Lynch (Former Executive Director

Could occupational health and safety laws be applied to better protect NFL players? A new analysis, published on April 17 in the Arizona Law Review, explores this very possibility.

The article, written by the Law and Ethics Initiative of the Football Players Health Study at Harvard University, examines whether the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) should take an active role in improving health and safety in the NFL workplace.

The article concludes that while OSHA clearly has the authority to regulate the NFL, there is little to no precedent or guidance for OSHA to insert itself into the on-the-field aspects of professional sports. The small body of case law that bears on OSHA’s authority in entertainment and sports opens some doors for OSHA to issue standards for the NFL but also sets some limits on its ability to alter the nature of the game. Adding a public institution like OSHA as a party to existing labor-management discussions concerning health and safety may be the best natural evolution of the issue, the report says, mapping a pathway for OSHA to step up to this challenge. Read More

Redefining Death in the Law

Gali Katznelson Leave a comment

By: Gali Katznelson

Jahi McMath was issued a death certificate four years ago in California. Today, at the age of 16, she remains connected to a ventilator in an apartment in New Jersey. Jahi was declared brain dead by her clinicians at Oakland’s Children’s Hospital following a cardiac arrest after a tonsillectomy. A legal battle between Jahi’s mother and the hospital ensued, with the mother requesting that Jahi remain on life support. The hospital refused, and after the hospital released Jahi to a coroner who issued her death certificate, Jahi’s family transported her to a paediatric ICU in a New Jersey hospital. New Jersey is the only state with a law requiring hospitals to accommodate patients whose families do not accept a determination of brain death on religious grounds.

Religious objections to brain death come from some members of the Orthodox Jewish, Japanese Shinto, Native American and Muslim communities. New York, California and Illinois also mandate accommodations for religious objections to brain death but these states leave the nature of the accommodation to the discretion of individual hospitals. This is unlike New Jersey, which allows an exception to brain death criteria and imposes a duty to accommodate patients who reject brain death state-wide. Should all states enact some form of a religious accommodation to brain death? To consider the same person to be alive in one part of the country but dead in another seems illogical. But rather than adapting current laws to accommodate objections based on religion, a more coherent approach might be to redefine the nature of the law itself.

As it stands in the US, the determination of brain death by neurological criteria is equated to a legal definition of death. This history dates back fifty years, to a report by the Harvard Ad Hoc Committee on Brain Death that defined irreversible coma as a new criterion for death. Neurologic criteria for death eventually made its way into law through the 1981 Uniform Declaration of Death Act (UDDA). This model statute states that death could be determined for an individual who has sustained either irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem, made in accordance with acceptable medical standards. Every state has adopted some version of this statute.

Read More

Should courts treat destroyed embryos as “lost property” or “wrongful death”?

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

Bill of Health contributors Glenn Cohen and Dov Fox were featured in this week’s news coverage of novel claims related to recent freezer malfunctions at two major fertility clinics. A class-action suit by one Ohio couple who lost their embryos asks the court to afford embryos standing to use and declare that life begins at conception.Friday’s article asks: “Will Fertility Clinic Disaster Redefine Personhood?” From the piece:

Roe v. Wade made it clear that an embryo or fetus is not a person under the protections of constitutional and federal law. Since then, no [Supreme Court] ju[stices] have suggested otherwise, Dov Fox, a law professor at the University of San Diego, told The Daily Beast. That doesn’t mean that wrongful death claims cannot be filed on behalf of a fetus [or that] the fetus has legal standing as a person overall, but wrongful death can be brought on its behalf—”for lack of a better legal fiction,” Fox said.

Fox added that in similar cases dealing with the loss of embryos due to hospital or clinic in the past, the courts decide that an embryo is not a person for the purposes of wrongful death cases. He pointed to two cases where embryos were damaged—one in Arizona in 2005, and one in Illinois in 2008. Both held that the wrongful death statutes do not apply to the loss of an embryo that hasn’t yet been implanted in a womb. Therefore, it would be surprising if the Ohio court ruled differently. “It would fly in the face of all existing legal precedent,” Fox said. Read More

The Health Service Ombudsman: NHS Failing Patients with Mental Health Problems

John Tingle Leave a comment

By John Tingle

Failings in National Health Service (NHS) care for patients with mental health problems is a worryingly persistent story in the English media. Many reports show harrowing and dramatic failings in NHS care provision for the mentally ill some of which result in avoidable deaths.The Health Service Ombudsman  (HSO) represents the final stage in the NHS complaints procedure and is an independent  office reporting  directly  to Parliament.The HSO carry’s out investigations into complaints  and makes the final decisions on those that have not been resolved by the NHS in England.In a recently published report the HSO reveals reveals unjust, shocking and tragic failings  in NHS care provision for patients with mental health problems.Some mental health care complaints figures are given in the report.In 2016-2017 there were 14,106 complaints made to NHS mental health trusts (hospitals) with ,65% being upheld or partly upheld by the local organisation.Case work data between 2014-15 and 2017-18 was analysed and five key themes showing persistent failings that the HSO see in complaints being made emerged from this exercise:

  • Diagnosis and failure to treat.
  • Risk assessment and safety
  • Dignity and human rights.
  • Communication.
  •  Inappropriate discharge and provision of aftercare.

The HSO also points out in the report that the other common factor in the cases examined is too frequent substandard complaint handling by the NHS organisation. This adds insult to injury, compounding the impact of failings. Read More

Andrew Torrance on ‘The Week in Health Law’ Podcast

Nicolas P. Terry Leave a comment

By Nicolas Terry and Frank Pasquale

Subscribe to TWIHL here!

This week we welcome Kansas University law professor Andrew W. Torrance, who teaches and conducts research in patent law, intellectual property, innovation, and so much more! Andrew is Earl B. Shurtz Research Professor at the University of Kansas School of Law, and a winner of a 2015 University Scholarly Achievement Award at the University of Kansas.

Andrew leads us through a couple of fascinating topics on the bleeding edge of law & technology. First, he discusses the use of a page ranking-like model to value patents. Second, he introduces us to some governance and related models applied in the synthetic biology community to avoid the tragedy of the commons and supplement or replace traditional IP protection. Our conversation covers both how cutting edge technology of network analysis can help us better understand law, and how law can better govern cutting edge technology like synthetic biology.

The Week in Health Law Podcast from Frank Pasquale and Nicolas Terry is a commuting-length discussion about some of the more thorny issues in Health Law & Policy. Subscribe at Apple Podcasts, listen at Stitcher Radio Tunein, or Podbean, or search for The Week in Health Law in your favorite podcast app. Show notes and more are at TWIHL.com. If you have comments, an idea for a show or a topic to discuss you can find us on Twitter @nicolasterry @FrankPasquale @WeekInHealthLaw.

Our Aging Brains: Decision-making, Fraud, and Undue Influence

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

Our Aging Brains: Decision-making, Fraud, and Undue Influence
April 27, 2018 7:30 AM – 12:30 PM
Wasserstein Hall, Milstein East (2036)
Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA

With over 70 million Baby Boomers retiring, elder financial exploitation has been labeled the “Crime of the 21st Century.” In this half-day event, we will explore the neuroscience, psychology, and legal doctrine of financial decision-making in older adults. How does the aging brain make financial decisions, and when is it uniquely susceptible? How can courts best use science to improve their adjudication of disputes over “competency”, “capacity”, and “undue influence”? Is novel neuroimaging evidence of dementia ready for courtroom use? This conference will bring together experts in medicine, science, and law to explore these important questions and chart a path forward for dementia and the law.

Part of the Project on Law and Applied Neuroscience, a collaboration between the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School.

Learn more about the event here!

The Danger of Speaking for the Dying Patient with “Intellectual Disabilities”

aobodong Leave a comment

After suffering from Alzheimer’s disease for more than two decades, my grandma quietly passed away at a nursing home in California several years ago. This may sound like a story too common to tell in the United States. However, my grandma never wanted to go to a nursing home in the first place. As someone who spent the majority of her life in China, she only immigrated to the United States to reunite with her family after my grandpa passed. When her conditions first developed, her own children (my extended family who lived with her) considered her a burden and liability, and sent her away against her will – a stark violation of Confucian filial piety cherished in my culture. After being admitted to a public nursing home with very few Mandarin speaking staff and patients, her condition deteriorated rapidly, partly as a result of language barriers and general isolation from family and friends. She soon lost most of her basic functioning and remained in a borderline vegetative state for the last few years of her life.

I could not help but think about my grandma when I read a recently published piece in New York Times. In “A Harder Death for People with Intellectual Disabilities,” Tim Lahey, M.D., argues that current laws make it too difficult for the “loved ones” and legal guardians of patients with “intellectual disabilities” to make end-of-life decisions on behalf of patients who cannot speak for themselves. Based on his own experience with patients in intensive care units, he criticizes the burdensome legal procedures required in some states to allow legal guardians to “decline life-sustaining therapies” and medical providers to “avoid giving unwanted care that isn’t likely to heal” these patients. From his point of view, questions a judge may ask such as “how sure is the guardian or family member of the patient’s wishes?” and “what’s the doctors’ best estimate at a prognosis?” are slowing down the “prompt, patient-centered, bedside care that all of us deserve.” Read More

The Development and Certification of Decision Aids: Promoting Shared Decision-Making for Patients with Serious Illness

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

The Development and Certification of Decision Aids: Promoting Shared Decision-Making for Patients with Serious Illness
April 18, 2018 8:30 AM – 4:30 PM
Wasserstein Hall, Milstein East AB (2036)
Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA

Decision aids can be highly-effective tools to promote shared decision making and support patients in becoming engaged participants in their healthcare.  Join us for the first-ever convening with leaders behind a Washington experiment in certifying decision aids, as state officials, health systems, and on-the-ground implementation experts share lessons learned and discuss policy recommendations for national or statewide approaches to decision aid certification.  

Program Overview

Person-centered care presents a unique opportunity to achieve the Quadruple Aim, especially during serious illness when people are the most vulnerable. Building on the work of NQF and others, it is now clear that healthcare purchasers (states, plans, care providers) committed to person-centered care should also be committed to shared decision-making.

A number of policy initiatives have sought to increase the use of decision aids as an effective way to further shared decision making and person-centered care. Washington is the first – and so far only – state to recognize and act on this opportunity by establishing a process to certify decision aids across the health continuum, including during serious illness when people are the most vulnerable. The program will examine the Washington experience and also explore policy barriers for replication of the Washington model at the state and national levels.

This event is free and open to the public, but seating is limited and registration is required. Register now!

This event is part of the Project for Advanced Care and Health Policy, a collaboration between the Petrie-Flom Center and the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care (C-TAC), a non-partisan, non-profit alliance of over 130 national organizations dedicated to being a catalyst to change the health delivery system, empower consumers, enhance provider capacity and improve public and private policies in advanced illness care.

Learn more about the event here!

Monthly Round-Up of What to Read on Pharma Law and Policy

Ameet Sarpatwari Leave a comment

By Ameet Sarpatwari, Michael S. Sinha, and Aaron S. Kesselheim

Each month, members of the Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL) review the peer-reviewed medical literature to identify interesting empirical studies, policy analyses, and editorials on health law and policy issues relevant to current or potential future work in the Division.

Below are the abstracts/summaries for papers identified from the month of March. The selections feature topics ranging from the FDA’s regular approval of cancer drugs based on single-arm studies; to delays in the completion and reporting of clinical trials under the Paediatric Regulation in the EU, to legal challenges to state drug pricing laws. A full posting of abstracts/summaries of these articles may be found on our website.

  1. DeLoughery EP, Prasad V. The US Food and Drug Administration’s use of regular approval for cancer drugs based on single-arm studies: implications for subsequent evidence generation. Ann Oncol. 2018 Mar 1;29(3):527-529.
  2. Gupta R, Bollyky TJ, Cohen M, Ross JS, Kesselheim AS. Affordability and availability of off-patent drugs in the United States-the case for importing from abroad: observational study. BMJ. 2018 Mar 19;360:k831.
  3. Hwang TJ, Tomasi PA, Bourgeois FT. Delays in completion and results reporting of clinical trials under the Paediatric Regulation in the European Union: A cohort study. PLoS Med. 2018 Mar 1;15(3):e1002520.
  4. Lee TT, Kesselheim AS, Kapczynski A. Legal Challenges to State Drug Pricing Laws. JAMA. 2018 Mar 6;319(9):865-866.
  5. ‘t Hoen EF, Veraldi J, Toebes B, Hogerzeil HV. Medicine procurement and the use of flexibilities in the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, 2001-2016. Bull World Health Organ. 2018 Mar 1;96(3):185-193.
  6. Wagner J, Marquart J, Ruby J, Lammers A, Mailankody S, Kaestner V, Prasad V. Frequency and level of evidence used in recommendations by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network guidelines beyond approvals of the US Food and Drug Administration: retrospective observational study. BMJ. 2018 Mar 7;360:k668.