Thanks, appreciate these insights. I've been contemplating VA's Oracle / Cerner implementation and wondered if implementing the same systems across…
Morning Headlines 1/23/24
Amazon reportedly offers One Medical providers access to virtual consults with Amazon Pharmacy pharmacists as part of a pilot project geared towards improving outcomes for high-risk patients.
CMS Announces Model to Advance Integration in Behavioral Health
CMS will test a new technology-enabled Innovation in Behavioral Health Model that is designed to help community-based practices better coordinate behavioral healthcare with physical and social care services.
Ransomware gang claims responsibility for Christmas attack on Massachusetts hospital
The Money Message ransomware group claims that it has stolen 600GB of data from Anna Jaques Hospital, and that it has information related to parent system Beth Israel Lahey Health.
Insanely juicy HIT-adjacent news broke a couple weeks ago, now starting to snowball and get more attention in the media:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/01/top-harvard-cancer-researchers-accused-of-scientific-fraud-37-studies-affected/
https://forbetterscience.com/2024/01/02/dana-farberications-at-harvard-university/
A lot of BIG people at Dana Farber/Broad Institute, including Laurie Glimcher, appear to have wholesale fabricated study results earlier in their careers. Most of the fabrication appears to have been from 2003 – 2011, back when some subtle MS Paint/Adobe Photoshop manipulation of images seemed like a clever idea that no one would ever discover. Now that AI has advanced to be able to quickly and methodically detect these types of image manipulations, I suspect a LOT of people in medical academia leadership are going to start sweating and looking over their shoulders, hoping no one looks too closely at their previous published work. Ultimately I hope this will be a good outcome as people realize they will get caught a lot more easily if they fabricate results.
I think this comment on the Ars article says it well:
“As a scientist, I feel this wouldn’t happen if the motive was destroyed. Right now the scientists who get most rewarded with jobs, awards, and grants are those who find flashy, positive results. Which is a process of luck. Some decide to make their own luck, and we are left to determine their fraud through wasted efforts at replication. This would be undermined if we rewarded workers based on the quality of their research rather than results (which in my opinion will inevitably include negative results, because that’s how science works). I say this as a worker who has published plenty of studies accepting the null, which I don’t feel have received the same attention or acclaim as my studies where I accepted the alternative hypothesis (a positive result).”
Hasn’t this been brewing for a while now though? I don’t mean this specific Institute. I mean, I’ve been hearing about problems with study replicability. For several years now.
The problem got so bad (being unable to replicate study results), that a whole movement started, to (essentially) audit published studies by systematically replicating them. And that forced studies to publish their methodologies to allow the replication to occur. It turned out that a lot of published research simply did not have enough information in their article, to permit study replication.
Ah, here we go. Just one example of course.
Rik Peels & Lex Bouter (2023) Replication and trustworthiness, Accountability in Research, 30:2, 77-87, DOI: 10.1080/08989621.2021.1963708