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Better Living Through Technology

By now it is common knowledge that it is going to take months and even years for the Gulf region to recover from the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history. Hopefully, the efforts to stop the oil leak will hold and the cleanup will be successful. New lessons learned from this disaster are being combined with earlier lessons learned from previous oil spills. The challenge now is to clean up oil contamination without using chemicals that may have a worse effect on the environment. An environmental technology company that successfully used oil-eating microbes for post-capture oil treatment in soil and water to aid in the Santa Barbara oil spill in the late 1960s is working with entrepreneurial companies to formulate products that could significantly aid the cleanup process without the harmful environmental effects of conventional processes. It does not make sense to clean up oil contamination using chemicals that may have a worse effect on the environment.

In another arena, a panel of IT policy and technology experts have expressed concern that the race to meet standards for electronic health records (EHRs) and find ways to exchange them regionally and nationally poses a great risk to privacy and identity. They warn that identity management and access authentication security needs to be “baked-in from the start, not tacked on at the end.”

Using a smart card-based patient card to more accurately link individuals to their medical and administrative records is seen as a way to address this because the public can easily use it for authentication to tell who they are precisely. This is a huge transition for the healthcare industry from out of the current model of keeping medical records at the place they are created and somehow assembling the information later when it is needed, which has its flaws, to something more like a health bank, essentially an electronic safe deposit box that provides a secure repository for an individual’s comprehensive health record. The patient would strictly control access to the information, guaranteeing both privacy and consent.

An initiative coming from the private sector is attempting to address the issues surrounding healthcare identity by establishing a Voluntary Universal Healthcare Identifier. This grass-roots approach would give individuals their own “medical ID for life” and eventually use it to uniquely identify their own electronic health records.

An exciting breakthrough in healthcare technology has been made in a collaboration between artificial intelligence (AI) technology, the Medloom real-time clinical support system and its high-performance object database platforms. This new AI software, named Ardvarc, is viewed as a leap forward in drug safety with potential to better the human condition by saving lives and reducing healthcare costs. Ardvarc is based on an AI technology known as Association Rule Discovery (ARD). Ardvarc vets data stored in safety registries, including the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System (AERS) to discover significant relationships between drugs, or combinations of drugs, and adverse event in real-time mode. In the first run of Ardvarc against a three month FDA dataset including roughly 50,000 reports, the AI system successfully discovered the same “substance-adverse event” relationship rule in a single run that had previously required efforts by researchers covering years of patient cases to discover. The quality of the findings discovered by Ardvarc was matched by those published in the peer reviewed literature, emphasizing that Ardvarc is capable of discovering meaningful red flags that no healthcare professional has time to read or analyze.

What do all of these stories have in common? We want to find ways of using technology to solve problems on our planet without having the technology itself make things worse.

As always, it is a pleasure to find and bring these informative articles to you. I hope you will enjoy this Summer 2010 issue of TMIS eNewsletter.

I am grateful to be in a collaborative business with many talented and skilled professionals. Additional feedback and recommendations for our products and services at TM Information Services are always welcome.

- Mary M. McLaughlin

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