Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Potential Wearable Device Could Discern Others' Emotions Based On The Sound Of Their Voice
Bloomberg: Amazon Is Working On A Wearable Device That Reads Human Emotions
Amazon.com Inc. is developing a voice-activated wearable device that can recognize human emotions. The wrist-worn gadget is described as a health and wellness product in internal documents reviewed by Bloomberg. It’s a collaboration between Lab126, the hardware development group behind Amazon’s Fire phone and Echo smart speaker, and the Alexa voice software team. (Day, 5/23)
Modern Healthcare: Separate EHRs Pose Care-Coordination Challenge For ACOs, OIG Finds
Patient care coordination tends to be easier for accountable care organizations whose participants are using a single electronic health record system, HHS' Office of Inspector General said Wednesday. The need for reliable data-sharing has placed a burden on ACOs to either invest in the same version of an EHR system or rely on non-electronic means, such as phone calls and faxes, to communicate patient information, according to the OIG report. Installing a new EHR can cost provider organizations millions of dollars after taking into account expenses related to purchasing the new system, training personnel and transferring data. (Cohen, 5/22)
Modern Healthcare: Health IT Advisory Committee Finalizes Info-Blocking Recommendations
The Health Information Technology Advisory Committee on Wednesday voted to remove price-transparency requirements from the proposed interoperability rule. In its second meeting this month hashing out recommendations on how the federal government should address concerns related to information blocking and patient privacy, HITAC cautioned that tying price transparency to the information-blocking proposals would have an "unintended consequence of slowing down the finalization of the current ONC rule." Instead, it recommended ONC create a separate price-transparency task force within HITAC to produce recommendations for future rulemaking. (Cohen, 5/22)
Stat: Behind The Scenes Of Google's Effort To Test AI For Cancer Screening
Behind the scenes of Google’s effort to build an AI system to screen patients for lung cancer is a long and tangled tale. A study the tech giant published Monday reported positive findings: The system outperformed radiologists in analyzing CT scans, significantly reducing false positives and finding more actual cancers (though more research is needed to show whether it would help patients live longer). But lest you think the AI revolution is now upon us — along with infallible lung cancer screening — consider the difficulty of wrangling the data needed to conduct the study. (Ross, 5/22)
