Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Monitoring Big Tech's Moves In Health Care
With the clock ticking on a European Commission probe into Google’s $2.1 billion bid for Fitbit, the tech giant offered regulators a concession late Monday, agreeing not to use Fitbit’s trove of health data to help target ads. Google had been staring down the possibility of a sweeping antitrust investigation by European regulators that was the latest in a series of probes into its deal with Fitbit announced last November. But the tech giant had a potential way to avoid the full thrust of the investigation: A promise, in the form of a binding pledge, not to use Fitbit’s fitness data for ad-targeting. (Brodwin, 7/14)
Since February of last year, tens of thousands of patients hospitalized at one of Minnesota’s largest health systems have had their discharge planning decisions informed with help from an artificial intelligence model. But few if any of those patients has any idea about the AI involved in their care. (Robbins and Brodwin, 7/15)
Public health officials in Houston are struggling to keep up with one of the nation’s largest coronavirus outbreaks. They are desperate to trace cases and quarantine patients before they spread the virus to others. But first, they must negotiate with the office fax machine. (Kliff and Sanger-Katz, 7/13)
UNC School of Medicine and UNC Health on Tuesday launched a mobile app that's designed to provide healthcare workers with mental health resources amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The Heroes Health app, a part of UNC School of Medicine's Heroes Health Initiative and developed with volunteers from Google, is meant to help healthcare workers better understand their own mental health, said Dr. Samuel McLean, an emergency medicine physician at the medical school who founded the initiative. (Cohen, 6/14)
