New paper on cross-disciplinary collaboration

By Timo Minssen

The nature of today’s most vital challenges and funding policies are driving more and more researchers towards interdisciplinary work. But what are the essential tools for those breaking the silos and leaving the comfort zones of their own disciplines?

Some advice on how to address the particular challenges and opportunities in interdisciplinary research are described in our recent paper “Ten Simple Rules for a Successful Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration” published in the online open access journal PLOS Computational Biology last month. Please find below and abstract of the paper, which has inter alia been discussed and cited by Times Higher Education.

Abstract:

Cross-disciplinary collaborations have become an increasingly important part of science. They are seen as a key factor for finding solutions to pressing societal challenges on a global scale including green technologies, sustainable food production and drug development. This has also been realized by regulators and policy-makers, as it is reflected in the 80 billion Euro “Horizon 2020” EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. This programme puts special emphasis at breaking down barriers between fields to create a path breaking environment for knowledge, research and innovation.

However, igniting and successfully maintaining cross-disciplinary collaborations can be a delicate task. In this article we focus on the specific challenges associated with cross-disciplinary research in particular from the perspective of the theoretician. As research fellows of the 2020 Science project and collaboration partners, we bring broad experience of developing interdisciplinary collaborations [2–12]. We intend this guide for early career computational researchers as well as more senior scientists who are entering a cross disciplinary setting for the first time. We describe the key benefits, as well as some possible pitfalls, arising from collaborations between scientists with backgrounds in very different fields.

Proposed citation:

Knapp B, Bardenet R, Bernabeu MO, Bordas R, Bruna M, Minssen T, et al. (2015) Ten Simple Rules for a Successful Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration. PLoS Comput Biol 11(4): e1004214. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004214

How to Fix Our Hospital Pricing Problem (and How Not To)

Guest post by Erin Fuse Brown
[Cross-posted from Center for Law, Health and Society Blog]

Last month, Slate columnist Reihan Salam wrote a provocative article about outrageous hospital prices that are driven, according to Salam, by greed, avarice, and market power. Salam gets a few things dead right, namely his diagnosis that we have a massive hospital pricing problem that is bleeding us dry and that the problem is largely caused by growing hospital market power. However, he misses the mark when laying out policy recommendations to curb monopoly-driven hospital prices.

The solutions

Antitrust:  Salam favors using antitrust enforcement to prevent health care consolidation and to reduce barriers to entry for competition. The biggest problem with antitrust enforcement is that it can do little to reverse or break up existing monopolies. Antitrust laws will be unable to help the vast majority of hospital markets that are already concentrated. Second, even with its improving success rate in court, the FTC simply cannot prevent or police the ongoing wave of hospital mergers, resulting in price increases up to 40% price increases in some areas. To be sure, increased antitrust enforcement is a necessary element of the strategy to control hospital prices to stem the tide of consolidation that is driving prices upward. But antitrust is no silver bullet, especially for hospital markets that have already become noncompetitive. Read More

Bioethicist Art Caplan: Why a New Alzheimer’s Drug Isn’t A No-Brainer

A new piece by contributor Art Caplan on NBC News:

Biogen, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech company, announced last week that early tests of their new drug aducanumab, a monoclonal antibody, had shown impressive results in treating those with early stage Alzheimer’s disease. The drug significantly reduced the amyloid plaque buildup in the brain that is associated with Alzheimer’s.

In a very early stage safety test aducanumab slowed the cognitive decline and dementia associated with Alzheimer’s in people. On the Mini Mental Status Exam, a widely used measure of cognitive function, people at risk of Alzheimer’s who got a placebo lost around 3 points over a year. But those who got the lowest dose of aducanumab worsened by just two points and those who got a higher dose lost less than a point.

Biogen was so excited by the early results in 166 volunteers that it is going to try to go directly to a much bigger clinical trial of the drug. Wall Street was very excited too—Biogen’s stock price shot up 10 percent. […]

See the full article here.

BOOK LAUNCH (3/11): Identified versus Statistical Lives: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Book Launch: Identified versus Statistical Lives: An Interdisciplinary Approach

March 11, 2015 12:00 PM

Wasserstein Hall, Room 2012 Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA

Identified versus Statistical Lives: An Interdisciplinary Approach is an edited volume that grew out of the 2012 conference “Identified versus Statistical Lives: Ethics and Public Policy,” cosponsored by the Petrie-Flom Center, Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, and the Harvard Global Health Institute. The essays address the identified lives effect, which describes the fact that people demonstrate a stronger inclination to assist persons and groups identified as at high risk of great harm than those who will or already suffer similar harm, but endure unidentified. As a result of this effect, we allocate resources reactively rather than proactively, prioritizing treatment over prevention. Such bias raises practical and ethical questions that extend to almost every aspect of human life and politics.

The book talk and discussion will feature:

  • I. Glenn Cohen, co-editor, Petrie-Flom Faculty Director, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School
  • Norman Daniels, co-editor, Professor of Population Ethics and Professor of Ethics and Population Health, Harvard School of Public Health
  • Nir Eyal, co-editor, Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine (Medical Ethics), Harvard Medical School

Co-sponsored by the Harvard Law School Library, with support from the Harvard Global Health Institute.

What Ebola Teaches Us About Public Health In America

This new post by George Annas appears on the Health Affairs Blog, as part of part of a series stemming from the Third Annual Health Law Year in P/Review event held at Harvard Law School on Friday, January 30, 2015.

2014 saw an epidemic of Ebola in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia, and an epidemic of fear in the US. Neither epidemic covered public health in glory. For Science, Ebola was the “breakdown of the year;” the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health called it “the most important public health story” of the year; Politfact labeled it the political “lie of the year,” and Time magazine named “the Ebola fighters” its “Person of the Year.” All of these characterizations contain some truth.

Response to the epidemic in Africa relied heavily on volunteer organizations, especially Christian charity groups like Samaritan’s Purse and SIM (Serving In Mission), and medical NGOs, most notably Doctors Without Borders (MSF). It was MSF that called out the World Health Organization (WHO) for its failure to recognize the epidemic, and then its inability to respond to it. Their International Health Regulations, it turned out, were much more like guidelines than any form of law, and the WHO had no capacity to effectively respond to a new epidemic. […]

Read the full post here.

Why does Mississippi lead the nation in child immunization?

By Ross D. Silverman

In the midst of the national discussion of measles and the state laws that foster or inhibit its spread, a curious fact has emerged, as noted recently by my JAMA co-author Tony Yang:

Mississippi, dead last in the nation’s overall health rankings in 2012, 2013, and 2014, leads the nation in childhood vaccination rates, and hasn’t had a measles outbreak in more than two decades.

How did this happen?

Mississippi’s state childhood immunization law does not offer exemptions for religious or personal beliefs, and its medical exemptions may only be issued by pediatricians, family physicians, or internists.

Why doesn’t Mississippi have a religious or a personal belief exemption?

First, states are not obligated to offer one, Read More

Global Health Impact and Access to Essential Medicines

By Nicole Hassoun, The Global Health Impact Project

Ebola is ravaging parts of Africa, yet it is not the worst health problem facing people in the region. Millions more are infected with and die every year from diseases like malaria, TB, and HIV/AIDS because they cannot access the essential medicines they need. To change this, we need to understand where we are succeeding in combating these diseases, and where we need to focus our efforts. Until now, this information has been sorely lacking.

Fortunately, the beta for a new Global Health Impact index has just launched that can help us address the access to medicines problem (check out: global-health-impact.org). Using the index, you can see the impact of the drugs for HIV, malaria, and TB in each country in the world. You can also get a sense for the overall impact we are having on the different diseases in the model. Finally, one can see drugs’ impacts by originator company. Read More

Pregnancy in the Ebola Epidemic – An update

By Kelsey Berry

A few weeks ago, I posted on this blog a discussion of an ethical dilemma in the treatment of Ebola-infected pregnant women in West Africa. I wanted to follow-up with two brief updates concerning Ebola and pregnancy in West Africa.

First, Medecins Sans Frontieres has opened the first care center specializing in treatment for Ebola-infected pregnant women in Sierra Leone. The care center will have 80 beds once it is fully operational and at present has one patient under care. In my last post I called for greater investigation into the reasons underlying higher mortality rates among Ebola-infected pregnant women, claiming that the causes of disparate outcomes in various population groups may be important to determine the justifiability of outcome-driven resource allocation. The new care center is ideally positioned to investigate and perhaps parse out biological, practice based, and institutional factors contributing to the disparity. There are some remaining questions — for instance, will capacity be reserved solely for pregnant women or other infected individuals seeking care? Further, we have already seen that MSF is investing resources in caring for a population for whom survival rates are nearly zero in the current Ebola epidemic; will continued commitment to treating this population depend upon observed changes in survival rates or other outcomes; or will the mere provision of care continue to justify the center if outcomes don’t improve measurably? This is a development I will continue to follow.

Read More

Cost Containment and Cost Shifting

By David Orentlicher
[Cross-posted at Health Law Profs.]

With Harvard professors protesting their increased responsibility for health care costs, we are seeing just the most visible aspect of the recurring cycle described in “Tragic Choices.” As Guido Calabresi and Philip Bobbitt observed in that book, society tries to defuse societal conflict by hiding its rationing choices through implicit forms of rationing. Thus, for example, health care insurers relied on managed care organizations in the 1990’s to contain health care costs with the premise that managed care would preserve health care access and quality while squeezing the fat out of the health care system.

But after a time, the public realizes what’s going on and rebels against the implicit rationing policy. Hence, managed care’s effective cost containment strategies, such as limited networks of physicians or primary care gatekeeping, were dumped, and health care costs began to climb again.

What did health care insurers turn to after abandoning serious managed care? Shifting more of the costs of health care to patients through higher deductibles and higher copayments. Insurers didn’t need to identify limits on their coverage because individuals would respond to their higher out-of-pocket costs by hesitating to seek care. Costs would be contained by “market forces” rather than rationing. But the Harvard professors and other Americans are now rebelling against the shifting-of-costs policy, just as Calabresi and Bobbitt predicted in 1978. (Indeed, they even included the shifting of costs as an example of an implicit rationing strategy.) Read More

Arthur Caplan on Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy

Art Caplan has a new piece on hyperbaric oxygen therapy over at NBC News:

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Have you ever heard of it? The Internet sure has.

Centers and clinics tout the benefits of sitting in a tank breathing 100 percent oxygen at higher than atmospheric pressure for treating autism, infant brain trauma, multiple sclerosis, chronic fatigue, cerebral palsy and many other conditions.

There’s just one problem: There is no solid evidence that hyperbaric oxygen therapy does anything for any of these disorders.

Read the full article here.