Alexander Tsai in Nature: “An important challenge in addressing mental-health problems is that trends can be difficult to detect because detection relies heavily on self-disclosure. As such, helplines — telephone services that provide crisis intervention to callers seeking help — might serve as a particularly useful source of anonymized data regarding the mental health of a population. This profiling could be especially useful during the COVID-19 pandemic, given the potential emergence or exacerbation of mental-health problems. Together, the threat of disease to oneself and others that is associated with a local epidemic, the restrictiveness of local non-pharmaceutical interventions (such... (More >)
Open health data: Mapping the ecosystem
Paper by Roel Heijlen and Joep Crompvoets: “Governments around the world own multiple datasets related to the policy domain of health. Datasets range from vaccination rates to the availability of health care practitioners in a region to the outcomes of certain surgeries. Health is believed to be a promising subject in the case of open government data policies. However, the specific properties of health data such as its sensibilities regarding privacy, ethics, and ownership encompass particular conditions either enabling or preventing datasets to become freely and easily accessible for everyone… This paper aims to map the ecosystem of open... (More >)
Understanding Algorithmic Discrimination in Health Economics Through the Lens of Measurement Errors
Paper by Anirban Basu, Noah Hammarlund, Sara Khor & Aasthaa Bansal: “There is growing concern that the increasing use of machine learning and artificial intelligence-based systems may exacerbate health disparities through discrimination. We provide a hierarchical definition of discrimination consisting of algorithmic discrimination arising from predictive scores used for allocating resources and human discrimination arising from allocating resources by human decision-makers conditional on these predictive scores. We then offer an overarching statistical framework of algorithmic discrimination through the lens of measurement errors, which is familiar to the health economics audience. Specifically, we show that algorithmic discrimination exists when measurement... (More >)
Evaluating the trade-off between privacy, public health safety, and digital security in a pandemic
Paper by Titi Akinsanmi and Aishat Salami: “COVID-19 has impacted all aspects of everyday normalcy globally. During the height of the pandemic, people shared their (PI) with one goal—to protect themselves from contracting an “unknown and rapidly mutating” virus. The technologies (from applications based on mobile devices to online platforms) collect (with or without informed consent) large amounts of PI including location, travel, and personal health information. These were deployed to monitor, track, and control the spread of the virus. However, many of these measures encouraged the trade-off on privacy for safety. In this paper, we reexamine the nature... (More >)
Can digital technologies improve health?
The Lancet: “If you have followed the news on digital technology and health in recent months, you will have read of a blockbuster fraud trial centred on a dubious blood-testing device, a controversial partnership between a telehealth company and a data analytics company, a social media company promising action to curb the spread of vaccine misinformation, and another addressing its role in the deteriorating mental health of young women. For proponents and critics alike, these stories encapsulate the health impact of many digital technologies, and the uncertain and often unsubstantiated position of digital technologies for health. The Lancet and... (More >)
Open data in digital strategies against COVID-19: the case of Belgium
Paper by Robert Viseur: “COVID-19 has highlighted the importance of digital in the fight against the pandemic (control at the border, automated tracing, creation of databases…). In this research, we analyze the Belgian response in terms of open data. First, we examine the open data publication strategy in Belgium (a federal state with a sometimes complex functioning, especially in health), second, we conduct a case study (anatomy of the pandemic in Belgium) in order to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of the main COVID-19 open data repository. And third, we analyze the obstacles to open data publication. Finally,... (More >)
Building the Behavior Change Toolkit: Designing and Testing a Nudge and a Boost
Blog by Henrico van Roekel, Joanne Reinhard, and Stephan Grimmelikhuijsen: “Changing behavior is challenging, so behavioral scientists and designers better have a large toolkit. Nudges—subtle changes to the choice environment that don’t remove options or offer a financial incentive—are perhaps the most widely used tool. But they’re not the only tool. More recently, researchers have advocated a different type of behavioral intervention: boosting. In contrast to nudges, which aim to change behavior through changing the environment, boosts aim to empower individuals to better exert their own agency. Underpinning each approach are different perspectives on how humans deal with bounded... (More >)
Mobile Big Data in the fight against COVID-19
Editorial to Special Collection of Data&Policy by Richard Benjamins, Jeanine Vos, and Stefaan Verhulst: “Almost two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, parts of the world feel like they may slowly be getting back to (a new) normal. Nevertheless, we know that the damage is still unfolding, and that much of the developing world Southeast Asia and Africa in particular — remain in a state of crisis. Given the global nature of this disease and the potential for mutant versions to develop and spread, a crisis anywhere is cause for concern everywhere. The world remains very much in the grip... (More >)
Volunteers Sped Up Alzheimer’s Research
Article by SciStarter: “Across the United States, 5.7 million people are living with Alzheimer’s disease, the seventh leading cause of death in America. But there is still no treatment or cure. Alzheimer’s hits close to home for many of us who have seen loved ones suffer and who feel hopeless in the face of this disease. With Stall Catchers, an online citizen science project, joining the fight against Alzheimer’s is as easy as playing an online computer game… Scientists at Cornell University found a link between “stalled” blood vessels in the brain and the symptoms of Alzheimer’s. These stalled... (More >)
Secondary use of health data in Europe
Report by Mark Boyd, Dr Milly Zimeta, Dr Jeni Tennison and Mahad Alassow: “Open and trusted health data systems can help Europe respond to the many urgent challenges facing its society and economy today. The global pandemic has already altered many of our societal and economic systems, and data has played a key role in enabling cross-border and cross-sector collaboration in public health responses.Even before the pandemic, there was an urgent need to optimise healthcare systems and manage limited resources more effectively, to meet the needs of growing, and often ageing, populations. Now, there is a heightened need to... (More >)
