Loyalty card data on over-the-counter medicine purchases could help spot ovarian cancer cases earlier, an Imperial College London-led study suggests. The study of almost 300 women found that pain and indigestion medication purchases were higher in women who were subsequently diagnosed with ovarian cancer, compared to women who did not have ovarian cancer. This change […]
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How social media sites and algorithms effect our wellbeing. […]
A major weakness in all nutrition and diet studies is that we have no true measure of what people eat. We rely solely on people keeping logs of their daily diets – but studies suggest around 60 per cent of people misreport what they eat to some extent. So although we have big data collections […]
In theory, the PIP scandal was just about one factory in France producing substandard breast implants. In practice, it proved to be a watershed moment for the entire UK cosmetic surgery industry, opening it up to a wave of investigations and reviews and exposing its gravest flaws. Undoubtedly one of the industry’s greatest weaknesses was […]
The challenge of making data and personal medical information available to individual patients and clinicians in a secure timely way is one that has been around for a long time. Failure to respond to this means that GPs are always asking, ‘what have you done to my patients?’, long after people have been discharged from […]
Millions of people suffer from asthma which is now recognised as a syndrome rather than a single disease. However, we lack the high-quality data sets to understand the ‘bigger picture’ of this common lung condition and will separate out the different mechanisms linked to distinct asthma types. Yes, we can look at NHS data and patient records, but this information […]
In rural areas of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Africa’s second largest country with vast fertile lands and thousands of lakes, rivers and streams, one in ten people do not have enough food to eat. Food insecurity – the “availability and adequate access at all times to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to maintain […]
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As I write in a patient’s notes in clinic, with the end of my pen in my mouth, I fall into a reverie thinking of the fully paperless NHS, which Jeremy Hunt has promised by 2018. The urgency for the digital agenda is driven by the growth of the data underlying every aspect of healthcare. […]
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Outcomes data is information about the results of surgery that can be published and used by surgeons, patients and hospitals to ultimately improve safety and quality. The government in 2013 made a commitment to produce individual surgeons’ outcome data, from national clinical audits. In 2013, the Royal College of Surgeons published the first set of […]
Predictive health monitoring is widely used in engineering applications to detect damage to infrastructure as early as possible. Forecasting failure rather than merely detecting failure once it occurs helps to reduce the downtime of systems, and, ideally, performing predictive maintenance to avoid downtime completely. With this approach already widely used in many fields from commercial […]
Read More… from Can a rural hand pump tell you it’s not well?