Disruptive Innovation and the Rise of the Retail Clinic

By Michael Young

The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) projects that by 2025 the United States will face a shortage of 130,600 physicians, representing a near 18-fold increase from the deficit of 7,400 physicians in 2008.  The widening gap between physician supply and demand has grown out of a complex interplay of legal, political, and social factors, including a progressively aging population, Congressionally mandated caps on the number of Medicare-funded residency slots and funding for graduate medical education, and waning interest among medical school graduates in pursuing careers in primary care.

These issues generate unprecedented opportunities for healthcare innovators and entrepreneurs to design solutions that can effectively address widening disparities between healthcare supply and demand, particularly within vulnerable and underserved areas.

Read More

Avoiding the Crash: New research on fatality rates for cyclists and pedestrians in distracted driving crashes

By Jacqueline Jefferson, BS (’14), Temple University Department of Public Health

Today it seems impossible for drivers to keep both hands on the steering wheel and eyes on the road, with all the technology that is available to us, temptation is at its best. Somewhere along the road our eyes look down at a text message or our hands wander to program the GPS — both distract us from the task at hand: driving. There are laws being enacted all over the country to curb distracted driving (such as the one just recently passed in Maryland) but, there are other factors in this issue. The question also becomes about whether our roads and communities are protecting pedestrians and bicyclists — in other words, how are we protecting the people who do not have four sides of steel protecting them from injury?

Let’s take a closer look at the problem. A study published this week in Public Health Reports by PHLR grantee Fernando Wilson, PhD, examines victims of fatal distracted driving crashes and shows that fatality rates of motorist victims of distracted driving crashes are falling while fatalities of pedestrian and bicyclist distracted driving crashes substantially increased from 2005 to 2010. Read More

Unreliable Biomedical Science, and a Solution?

By Christopher Robertson

The Economist has a long, detailed, and readable piece about the difficulties of inferring anything from the published findings of biomedical science.  There are all sorts of problems that fall short of scientific fraud, including the the biases caused by industry-funding of biomedical science, the biases of unblinded raters who see what they want to see, and the biases of journal editors towards only publishing “positive” findings.  (I am particularly enamored with this graphic, which shows the fundamental problem of inference.)  It is rare for researchers to even bother to attempt to replicate prior findings, but when replications are attempted, they often fail.  

The Economist piece can be read as something close to an outright assault on empiricism, at least as we now know it.  In practical terms, it is prudent for physicians, patients, and payors to be wary of the findings presented in even the top journals.

One of the beauties of our scientific system is that it is wildly decentralized.  Scientists (and their funders) can test any hypothesis that they find interesting, and they can use whatever methods they prefer.  Likewise, journal editors can publish whatever they want.  While such academic and market freedom is attractive, it results in quite a hodgepodge of science, with replication studies and publication of null results being afterthoughts.  The NIH and NSF have in the past functioned to set an agenda and demand rigor, but as their funding wanes, the chaos waxes.

The problems are scientific, but any solution will be institutional (and thus legal).  I have argued for a partial solution to industry bias in my short article, called “The Money Blind:  How to Stop Industry Influence in Biomedical Science Without Violating the First Amendment.”  Independent scientific testing could be conducted by a neutral intermediary, which would pool funds.  In a similar vein, there is also a new project of the Science Exchange, called “The Reproducibility Initiative.”  This program offers to be the independent scientific agency, which attempts to validate known results.   But there is not yet a large-scale funding model in place.  If biomedical journal editors would at least put disclosures in their structured abstracts (an intervention we have tested), over the long run that may also nudge industry to use such gold-standard independent testing, when they have something that is truly provable.  And, at least in the domain of the products regulated by the FDA, the agency should consider using its current statutory authority to push companies towards independent, robust, and replicated science.

Another Legislative Win for Opioid Death Prevention

By Scott Burris

The rising public and legislative awareness of opioid overdose has been a case study in the twists and turns of culture, risk perception and the role of evidence in policy making. An interesting case study, which does not mean I understand what happened or why.

I first got involved in overdose through Dan Abrahamson, the Legal Director at the Drug Policy Alliance. This was back in 1999 or 2000, and a group of drug researchers and drug policy people convened a meeting in Seattle to discuss the chronic, neglected problem of overdose among heroin users.  There were a few health people who were highly aware of the human and economic costs, and the scale of the problem. Karl Sporer, a San Francisco ER doc, was one of the few publishing on the problem. One of the interesting ideas discussed at the meeting was distributing naloxone, the standard antidote for opioid overdose, directly to heroin users. New Mexico, which had the nation’s highest OD death rates, was trying it as a way to deal with the great distances that divided rural heroin users from EMS assistance. With Joanna Norland and Brian Edlin, I ended up writing an analysis of the legality of distributing this prescription drug to drug users.

In the next few years, led by people like Dan Bigg of the Chicago Recovery Alliance, needle exchange programs in urban areas began naloxone programs. They were spurred in 2006 when several US cities experienced an epidemic of overdose tied to the adulteration of the heroin supply with a synthetic opioid, fentanyl. By May, 2009, 57 naloxone programs were operating in 17 U.S. states.  That year, DPA funded a group of scientists and practitioners to brainstorm on how to increase drug users’ access to this life-saving intervention.  Read More

The Troubled Peer Review System, the Open Access Wars, & the Blurry Line Between Human Subjects Research & Investigative Journalism

By Michelle Meyer

Legal academics who work across disciplines sometimes find themselves in the uncomfortable position of explaining to their stunned colleagues the process by which second- and third-year law students, armed with author c.v.s, decide what gets published and where.

Well, get ready to get your schadenfreude on. For the past 10 months, John Bohannon, a contributing correspondent for Science magazine, has been conducting a sting of (other) science journals and their peer review processes. Much like the famed Sokal hoax, Science submitted to 304 journals a bogus paper written by a fictitious researcher from a nonexistent institution. The paper described “the anticancer properties of a chemical that [the fictitious researcher] had extracted from a lichen,” and according to Bohannon, “[a]ny reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper’s short-comings immediately” and rejected it promptly. And yet, over half of the journals accepted the paper. Recall that the bogus paper purports to report on the discovery of the anticancer properties of lichen. Let the prospect of bogus cancer research published in peer reviewed medical journals sink in.  Read More

(Taboo) Science, Policy & the Importance of Good Science Communication: Redux

By Michelle Meyer

In late May, I wrote the following:

Yesterday, the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium, an international consortium that pools and conducts social science research on existing genome-wide association study (GWAS) data, and on whose Advisory Board I sit, published (online ahead of print) the results of its first study in Science. That paper — “GWAS of 126,559 Individuals Identifies Genetic Variants Associated with Educational Attainment” — like much human genetics research, has the potential to be misinterpreted in the lay, policy, and even science worlds. That’s why, in addition to taking care to accurately describe the results in the paper itself, including announcing the small effect sizes of the replicated SNPs in the abstract, being willing to talk to the media (many scientists are not), and engaging in increasingly important “post-publication peer review” conversations on Twitter (yes, really) and elsewhere — we put together this FAQ of what the study does — and, just as important, does not — show. So far, our efforts have been rewarded with responsible journalism that helps keep the study’s limits in the foreground.

I had no role in the GWAS itself; that credit goes to SSGAC’s extraordinarily meticulous scientists. I did, however, have a strong hand in the FAQs. And so I am really pleased that in a new editorial, the editors of Nature (not for nothing, Science’s main competitor) highlighted our FAQ as an example of best practices in behavioral genetics research and science communication. They write:

For clarity, scientists would do well to follow the example of the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium. In June, this group published a paper on genetic variants associated with educational attainment (C. A. Rietveld et al. Science 340, 1467–1471; 2013). Accompanying this was a nine-page Frequently Asked Questions document that, in plain, easy-to-understand language, addressed such questions as why the researchers did the study, what they found and what the implications of the work are — and are not (see go.nature.com/7mov2j). The document spelled out that the consortium had not found ‘the gene’ for educational attainment, that each genetic marker found has only a very small effect on length of schooling, and that any policy response based on that single study would be premature.

Scientists cannot be held responsible every time someone misinterprets their work. But simple steps such as these could help to prevent and address some of the potential distortions of behavioural genetics — and could help to ensure that society continues to support the work.

For more on taboo science—including IQ, race, violence, and sexuality—see Erika Check Hayden’s accompanying article, which discusses our Science GWAS in the IQ category and (elsewhere in the article) quotes Duke lawprof (and new Conspirator!) Nita Farahany and Bill of Health guest contributor Yaniv Erlich. Now if we could only get popularizers of science to understand that their lay audience will rarely know that they are “oversimplifying” that science.

[Cross-posted at The Faculty Lounge]

Ethical Concerns, Conduct and Public Policy for Re-Identification and De-identification Practice: Part 3 (Re-Identification Symposium)

This post is part of Bill of Health’s symposium on the Law, Ethics, and Science of Re-Identification Demonstrations. Background on the symposium is here. You can call up all of the symposium contributions by clicking here. —MM

By Daniel C. Barth-Jones

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this symposium contribution I wrote about a number of re-identification demonstrations and their reporting, both by the popular press and in scientific communications. However, even beyond the ethical considerations that I’ve raised about the accuracy of some of these communications, there are additional ethical, “scientific ethos”, and pragmatic public policy considerations involved in the conduct of re-identification research and de-identification practice that warrant some more thorough discussion and debate.

First Do No Harm

Unless we believe that the ends always justify the means, even obtaining useful results for guiding public policy (as was the case with the PGP demonstration attack’s validation of “perfect population register” issues) doesn’t necessarily mean that the conduct of re-identification research is on solid ethical footing. Yaniv Erlich’s admonition in his “A Short Ethical Manifesto for the Privacy Researcher blog post contributed as part of this symposium provides this wise advice: “Do no harm to the individuals in your study. If you can prove your point by a simulation on artificial data – do it.” This is very sound ethical advice in my opinion. I would argue that the re-identification risks for those individuals in the PGP study who had supplied 5-digit Zip Code and full date of birth were already understood to be unacceptably high (if these persons were concerned about being identified) and that no additional research whatsoever was needed to demonstrate this point. However, if additional arguments needed to be made about the precise levels of the risks, this could have been adequately addressed through the use of probability models. I’d also argue that “data intrusion scenario” uncertainty analyses which I discussed in Part 1 of this symposium contribution already accurately predicted the very small re-identification risks found for the sort of journalist and “nosy neighbor” attacks directed at the Washington hospital data. When strong probabilistic arguments can be made regarding potential re-identification risks, there is little possible purpose for undertaking actual re-identifications that can impact specific persons.

Looking more broadly, it seems more reasonably debatable whether the earlier January re-identification attacks by the Erlich lab on the CEPH – Utah Residents with Northern and Western European Ancestry (CEU) participants could have been warranted by virtue of the attack having exposed a previously underappreciated risk. However, I think an argument could likely be made that, given the prior work by Gitschier which had already revealed the re-identification vulnerabilities of CEU participants, the CEU portion of the Science paper also might not have served any additional purpose in directly advancing the science needed for development of good public policy. Without the CEU re-identifications though, it is unclear whether the surname inference paper would have been published (at least by a prominent journal like Science) and it also seems quite unlikely that it would have sustained nearly the level of media attention.

Read More

Press and Reporting Considerations for Recent Re-Identification Demonstration Attacks: Part 2 (Re-Identification Symposium)

By Michelle Meyer

This post is part of Bill of Health‘s symposium on the Law, Ethics, and Science of Re-Identification Demonstrations. Background on the symposium is here. You can call up all of the symposium contributions by clicking here. —MM

Daniel C. Barth-Jones, M.P.H., Ph.D., is a HIV and infectious disease epidemiologist.  His work in the area of statistical disclosure control and implementation under the HIPAA Privacy Rule provisions for de-identification is focused on the importance of properly balancing competing goals of protecting patient privacy and preserving the accuracy of scientific research and statistical analyses conducted with de-identified data. You can follow him on Twitter at @dbarthjones.

Forecast for Re-identification: Media Storms Continue…

In Part 1 of this symposium contribution, I wrote about the re-identification “media storm” started in January by the Erlich lab’s “Y-STR” re-identifications which made use of the relationship between Short Tandem Repeats (STRs) on the Y chromosome and paternally inherited surnames. Within months of that attack, April and June brought additional re-identification media storms; this time surrounding re-identification of Personal Genome Project (PGP) participants and a separate attack matching 40 persons within the Washington State hospital discharge database to news reports. However, as I have written has sometimes been the case with past reporting on other re-identification risks, accurate and legitimate characterization of re-identification risks has, unfortunately, once again been over-shadowed by distortive and exaggerated reporting on some aspects of these re-identification attacks. Unfortunately, a careful review of both the popular press coverage and scientific communications for these recent re-identification demonstrations displays some highly misleading communications, the most egregious of which incorrectly informs more than 112 million persons (more than one third of the U.S. population) that they are at potential risk of re-identification when they would not actually be unique and, therefore, re-identifiable. While each separate reporting concern that I’ve addressed here is important in and of itself, the broader pattern that can be observed for these communications about re-identification demonstrations raises some serious concerns about the impact that such distortive reporting could have on the development of sound and prudent public policy for the use of de-identified data.

Reporting Fail (and after-Fails)

University of Arizona law professor Jane Yakowitz Bambauer was the first to call out the distortive “reporting fail” for the PGP “re-identifications” in her blog post on the Harvard Law School Info/Law website. Bambauer pointed out that a Forbes article (written by Adam Tanner, a fellow at Harvard University’s Department of Government, and colleague of the re-identification scientist) covering the PGP re-identification demonstration was misleading with regard to a number of aspects of the actual research report released by Harvard’s Data Privacy Lab. The PGP re-identification study attempted to re-identify 579 persons in the PGP study by linking their “quasi-identifiers” {5-digit Zip Code, date of birth and gender} to both voter registration lists and an online public records database. The Forbes article led with the statement that “more than 40% of a sample of anonymous participants” had been re-identified. (This dubious claim was also repeated in subsequent reporting by the same author in spite of Bambauer’s “call out” of the inaccuracy explained below.) However, the mischaracterization of this data as “anonymous” really should not have fooled anyone beyond the most casual readers. In fact, approximately 80 individuals among the 579 were “re-identified” only because they had their actual names included within file names of the publically available PGP data. Some two dozen additional persons had their names embedded within the PGP file names, but were also “re-identifiable” by matching to voter and online public records data. Bambauer points out that the inclusion of the named individuals was “not relevant to an assessment of re-identification risk because the participants were not de-identified,” and quite correctly adds that “Including these participants in the re-identification number inflates both the re-identification risk and the accuracy rate.

As one observer humorously tweeted after reading Bambauer’s blog piece,

It’s like claiming you “reidentified” people from their high school yearbook”.

Read More

Safe Surgery Checklists May Raise Unintended Ethical and Legal Questions, Especially in Low-Resource Settings

By Matt Baum

The WHO Surgical Safety Checklist is unusual as a patient-safety intervention in that it has been widely promoted as universally effective, i.e. effective both in high-income and resource-limited settings; checklists are now used in approximately 1800 hospitals worldwide. In a paper recently published in the journal, BMJ Open, Aveling and colleagues report the results of a qualitative study on the implementation of the WHO checklist in two UK hospitals and two hospitals in resource-constrained settings in Africa.  Their results suggest that the checklist is “no magic bullet” – that if adopted without proper investment and adaptation to the context of the target hospital, the checklist not only may fail to replicate benefits, but can actually levy its own unintended costs – especially in resource-limited settings. Though the study raises a number of interesting questions, given the nature of this blog, I am hoping that we might start a discussion about  those in the domain of ethics and law.

For example, consider the following real case, which was reported in the BMJ paper:

“A patient admitted for cholecystectomy [surgical removal of the gallbladder] suffered hypoxic [oxygen depriviation-related] brain injury and died following surgery. Subsequently, two staff members (not the surgeon) were threatened with guns by the patient’s family, who said that the surgical team had killed the patient. The two staff members were later arrested and criminal charges brought against one of them. One of the questions asked during the police investigation was whether a pulse oximeter [i.e. a tool for measuring blood-oxygen levels] had been used. It had not: according to staff, no pulse oximeter was available for use, even though the checklist requiring use of this equipment was, officially, in use at the hospital.”

The staff members also did not get any legal representation for weeks because there were no clear policies established surrounding who was responsible for providing that counsel.

Read More