Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Google Says It Can Predict When Patients Are Going To Die, But Not Many Impressed By 'Breakthrough'
Politico: Google Paper Stirs Interest, But Not Seen As Transformative
By throwing some of its best engineering and medical minds at vast stores of clinical data with the help of powerful computers running for hundreds of thousands of hours, Google appears to have produced a model that accurately predicts patient deaths, hospital readmissions and other health-related events. The model won't transform medicine. But academics and other technology mavens think the methods described in the paper serve as a prototype for future work in predictive models, in areas like end-of-life care. (Tahir, 2/13)
Boston Globe: Death Planning Software Faces An Obstacle: Baby Boomers Who Want To Live Forever
What happens when you develop a product for something really important that people would prefer to ignore? That’s the challenge facing Suelin Chen and other entrepreneurs like her who want to make it easier for baby boomers to deal with the prospect of death. Cake, the Boston startup Chen cofounded, has developed a website designed to help users navigate the thicket of legal documents and health care proxies associated with end-of-life planning. It also lets them assemble music playlists for their funerals and even choose whether to have a Facebook page deleted or converted to a memorial after they’ve stopped logging on. (Weisman, 2/10)
In other health and technology news —
Kaiser Health News: The Training Of Dr. Robot: Data Wave Hits Medical Care
The technology used by Facebook, Google and Amazon to turn spoken language into text, recognize faces and target advertising could help doctors combat one of the deadliest killers in American hospitals. Clostridium difficile, a deadly bacterium spread by physical contact with objects or infected people, thrives in hospitals, causing 453,000 cases a year and 29,000 deaths in the United States, according to a 2015 study in the New England Journal of Medicine. Traditional methods such as monitoring hygiene and warning signs often fail to stop the disease. (McQuaid, 2/14)
