Quick: turn on the TV (no, streaming doesn't count!). You won't have to wait too long before an ad for some prescription drug comes on. Watch long enough and pretty soon you'll suspect that you have a variety of conditions that you may have never realized before and need to do something about immediately. Fortunately for you, of course, the pharmaceutical industry has solutions for you. It's all there in those ads. Whether we really understand them or not is another question. Direct-to-consumer (DTC) ads for prescription drugs are booming. After a brief respite during the most recent recession, they're back up, with spending estimated at some $5.2b in 2015 (amazingly, the DTC ads are less than 20% of pharma's overall marketing budget, with the majority of that going to face-to-face "educational" efforts with physicians)...
New Zealand
See the following -
Americans Living Longer Than Two Decades Ago, But Overall State Of Health Care Is 'Mediocre,' Despite Spending Increase: Report
The United States is falling behind its economic peers in most measures of health, despite making gains in the past two decades, according to a sweeping study of data from 34 countries. Read More »
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As Digital Rights Advocates Mobilize Around The TPP Negotiations, Process Becomes Even Less Transparent
The 15th round of Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement negotiations in New Zealand concluded this week, locking out civil society participation in an unprecedented way. [...] The chapter that EFF and other digital rights groups around the world find alarming covers intellectual property. [...] Read More »
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Australia to follow New Zealand's lead on changes to software patent laws
The movement to pass new laws doing away with software patents continues to pick up steam. Following on the heels of action by the government of New Zealand to abolish software patents, the Open Source Industry Australia (OSIA) is urging the Australian government to do the same. In addition to New Zealand's recent ban on software patents, the European Union (EU) has been debating similar moves for more than a decade. Brazil, Russia, India and China are also beginning to get on board with the idea. Read More »
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Banning Software Patents & 'Opening' IT Procurement Processes
Paul Matthews, Chief Executive of the Institute of IT Professionals (IITP), congratulated Commerce Minister Foss for listening to the information technology (IT) industry and supporting the nearly unanimous passage of New Zealand's recent law banning software patents. Read More »
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Diagnosing the Problem with Direct-to-Consumer Pharmaceutical Ads
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Digital Rights Activists Gather In Auckland, New Zealand Next Week For The 15th Round Of TPP Negotiations
Next week, the 15th round of Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) negotiations will begin in Auckland, New Zealand. Hundreds of delegates and private representatives from the now 11 participating nations will gather at a luxury casino to discuss this multi-faceted trade agreement. [...] Read More »
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Digital Rights Groups Shut Out Of Secret TPP Negotiations
Right now, EFF representatives in Auckland, New Zealand are being shut out of the 15th round of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP), a secretive, multi-national trade agreement that threatens to extend restrictive intellectual property (IP) laws across the globe. Read More »
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Drugs You Don't Need For Disorders You Don't Have
One evening in the late summer of 2015, Lisa Schwartz was watching television at her Vermont home when an ad for a sleeping pill called Belsomra appeared on the screen. Schwartz, a longtime professor at Dartmouth Medical College, usually muted commercials, but she watched this one closely: a 90-second spot featuring a young woman and two slightly cute, slightly creepy fuzzy animals in the shape of the words “sleep” and “wake”...
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Forget Obamacare: Vermont Wants To Bring Single Payer To America
"If Vermont gets single-payer health care right, which I believe we will, other states will follow," Vermont Gov. Shumlin predicted in a recent interview. "If we screw it up, it will set back this effort for a long time.
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Halamka's Health IT Observations from Japan and New Zealand
This week I’ve taken vacation time to help my colleagues in Japan and New Zealand with national IT planning. As I often say, the healthcare IT challenges are the same all over the world, but the cultural context is different. In Japan, I spent 2 days in Tokyo and 1 day in Kyoto, lecturing, meeting, and listening to stakeholders. There is a great desire to share data for care coordination and clinical trials/clinical research. Telemedicine/telehealth is increasingly important in an aging Japanese society that has increasing healthcare needs but a limited number of caregivers and few opportunities to increase healthcare budgets. Here are a few of the current issues we discussed...
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How New Zealand Banned Software Patents Without Violating International Law
What do you do when you’re a small country with a technology industry convinced that innovation requires the banning of software patents, but you’ve signed an international treaty that in theory obliges you to make software patentable? If you’re New Zealand, you simply declare, in a historic and long-debated bit of just-passed legislation, that software isn’t an invention in the first place. Read More »
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Is Machine Learning for the Birds?
Cacophony Project uses the latest technology to monitor and protect endangered bird populations against predators. The Cacophony Project's broad vision is to bring back New Zealand's native birds using the latest technology to monitor bird populations and humanely eliminate the introduced predators that are endangering them. The project started in our founder's backyard to measure the effectiveness of his efforts to protect the birds on his property. From this simple beginning, the project has quickly grown into a system that includes two edge devices, a cloud server, and automatic identification of animals using machine learning. The project has been completely open source from the beginning and sees regular contributions from a wide variety of volunteers.
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Modified Maggots Could Help Human Wound Healing
In a proof-of-concept study, NC State University researchers show that genetically engineered green bottle fly (Lucilia sericata) larvae can produce and secrete a human growth factor - a molecule that helps promote cell growth and wound healing. Sterile, lab-raised green bottle fly larvae are used for maggot debridement therapy (MDT), in which maggots are applied to non-healing wounds, especially diabetic foot ulcers, to promote healing. Maggots clean the wound, remove dead tissue and secrete anti-microbial factors. The treatment is cost-effective and approved by the Food and Drug Administration...
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New Zealand Can Lead Healthcare IT
I’ve been in New Zealand this week, meeting with government, academic, and industry leaders to discuss the IT challenges ahead - social networking-based teamwork for health, mobile applications, precision medicine analytics for decision support, and cloud computing all within a framework of protecting privacy. I believe that New Zealand has a unique opportunity to leapfrog the rest of the world with healthcare IT breakthroughs that show the rest of us what is possible from a 4.5 million person learning lab. Why? The perfect storm for innovation requires alignment of technology, psychology, and implementation. New Zealand is divided into 20 District Health Boards which improve the health of their populations by delivering high quality and accessible health care...
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New Zealand Ends Patents for Basic Software
International technology giants won’t be able to get patents for basic software under a law passed by the New Zealand government Read More »
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