clinical decision making

See the following -

A Case for Open Peer Review for Clinical Trials

A few weeks ago I played the part of an expert witness in the Medical Journalist Association’s mock trial, Trials on Trial. The charge was: “Is the current system of publishing clinical trials fit for purpose?” The jury’s verdict was a resounding ‘no’. You can read more about the event in Jane Feinmann’s write up on the BMJ Group Blogs.

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Antimicrobial Resistance Diagnostic Challenge Selects 10 Semifinalists in First Phase of Competition

Press Release | National Institutes of Health | March 27, 2017

Ten semifinalists have been selected in the first phase of the Antimicrobial Resistance Diagnostic Challenge, a federal prize competition that will award up to a total of $20 million in prizes, subject to the availability of funds, for innovative rapid, point-of-need diagnostic tests to combat the emergence and spread of drug resistant bacteria. The semifinalists were selected for their concepts for a diagnostic based on a technical and programmatic evaluation from among 74 submissions. While semifinalists will each receive $50,000 to develop their concepts into prototypes, anyone can submit a prototype to compete in the second phase of the challenge to win up to $100,000...

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Four Lessons In The Adoption Of Machine Learning In Health Care

Ernest Sohn, Joachim Roski, Steven Escaravage, and Kevin Maloy | Health Affairs | May 9, 2017

The March issue of Health Affairs demonstrates the potential of health care delivery system innovation to improve value for both patients and clinicians. Technology innovations such as machine learning and artificial intelligence systems are promising breakthroughs to improve diagnostic accuracy, tailor treatments, and even eventually replace work performed by clinicians, especially that of radiologists and pathologists. Machine-learning systems infer patterns, relationships, and rules directly from large volumes of data in ways that can far exceed human cognitive capacities...

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Is the Technology Gap the Reason Why Medical Errors are the 3rd Leading Cause of Death in the US?

Hardly a day goes by without some new revelation of an information technology (IT) mess in the United States that seems like an endless round of the old radio show joke contest, “Can You Top This” except that increasingly the joke is on us. From nuclear weapons updated with floppy disks, to critical financial systems in the Department of the Treasury that run on assembler language code (a computer language initially used in the 1950s and typically tied to the hardware for which it was developed), to medical systems that cannot exchange patient records leading to a large number of needless deaths from medical errors.

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Pfizer Unveils ATLAS®, An Interactive, User-Friendly Website That Provides Global Antibiotic Resistance Surveillance Data Across 60 Countries

Press Release | Pfizer Inc. | April 21, 2017

Pfizer Inc. today announced the launch of the company’s Antimicrobial Testing Leadership and Surveillance (ATLAS) website, which is designed to provide physicians and the global health community with easy access to critical data on the efficacy of various antibiotic treatments and emerging resistance patterns across more than 60 countries. Understanding evolving bacterial resistance patterns is a key element in managing the rise of antimicrobial resistance. To that end, ATLAS can not only help physicians select the most appropriate treatment choices for their patients, but also enable global health authorities to develop data-driven antimicrobial resistance mitigation strategies...

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Using It or Losing It? The Case for Data Scientists Inside Health Care

Marco D. Huesch, MBBS, PhD & Timothy J. Mosher, MD | NEJM Catalyst | May 4, 2017

As much as 30% of the entire world’s stored data is generated in the health care industry. A single patient typically generates close to 80 megabytes each year in imaging and electronic medical record (EMR) data. This trove of data has obvious clinical, financial, and operational value for the health care industry, and the new value pathways that such data could enable have been estimated by McKinsey to be worth more than $300 billion annually in reduced costs alone. If appropriate investments in data science are not made in-house, then hospitals and health systems will run the risk of becoming reliant on outsiders to analyze the data that ultimately will be used to inform decisions and drive innovation”...

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