Digital Health Science Digest – Issue 30
Watson’s mission to improve diabetes care using #digitalhealth, SMS can reduce smoking, and our director makes the case for more sidewalks and less surgeries…
The Digital Health Science Digest is a bimonthly newsletter compiled by Duke Digital Health. We bring you the most interesting research publications, policy news, and other fun digital health science stuff.
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Issue 30
06/17/2016
Tech
- Expanding even further into diabetes care, IBM’s Watson Health joined with the American Diabetes Association in a multi-year partnership whose goal is to improve diabetes care using digital health.
- AstraZeneca has launched an app to help patients track their prescriptions, learn more about their conditions, and access a savings card that is like a coupon book for prescription medications.
- #LongRead: this interview on digital health engagement with Suneel Gupta, the co-founder and CEO of Rise, a health coaching and weight loss program.
Research
- Systematic Review & Meta-Analysis: A systematic review on text-message based interventions for smoking cessation revealed that smokers who received an SMS-delivered intervention were more likely to abstain from smoking and reduce cigarette consumption, compared to controls. Our favorite part is the conclusion, where the authors state, “The evidence for the efficacy of text messaging interventions to reduce smoking behavior is well-established.”
- Outcomes: An internet-based, individually tailored Spanish-language physical activity promotion intervention designed for Latinas showed significant increases in exercise minutes per week in the intervention group as compared to the usual care group. At 6 months, the intervention group was significantly more likely to meet national physical activity guidelines than the control group.
- Research Protocol: The Institute for International Internet Interventions for Health is launching a study to test whether a mobile digital health intervention can help low-income English- and Spanish-speaking smokers with cessation efforts.
Policy
- The European Union has finalized a Code of Conduct on privacy for mHealth apps – among the issues it covers are: purpose limitation and data minimizaton; privacy by design and by default; principles on advertising in mHealth apps; and disclosing data to 3rd parties for processing operations.
- Listen to our Director, Gary Bennett, PhD, make the case for more sidewalks and fewer surgeries, on last week’s episode of Glad You Asked, a podcast by Duke University.
- England’s NHS is getting a digital health boost! A new program announced yesterday will approve up to 15 medical devices and health-related apps for wide release to patients by 2017.
- A federal court has ruled that high-speed internet service can be defined as a utility, effectively reinforcing the FCC’s argument that broadband services is as essential as phone, electricity, and gas service.
Grab bag
- We’re looking for an amazing Project Director to help us design and implement an exciting new trial. Check out the job description here and apply (or help us get the word out!)
- JMIR’s impact factor increased to 4.532 this year, moving up over a point since last year. Congratulations!
- Two Harvard professors are calling for a “patient-controlled health record infrastructure” in the New England Journal of Medicine, arguing that patients are now more able to easily upload health data. These data help create a complete picture of a patient and can lead to more accurate diagnoses and better treatment plans.
If you’d like to submit an event or article for us to publish in our digest, please send at least 3 weeks before the event to: erica.levine@duke.edu