Suchergebnisse

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented lessons on using health data to improve, save, and protect lives, and the need to improve the stewardship of health privacy. Before the pandemic, the United States already had a broken health data system, fragmented and dominated by public-private partnerships in which the businesses involved sought to commercialize patient data. More than two years into the pandemic, in many respects health data privacy is even more fractured and prone to being misused to profiteer and to harm rather than help the most vulnerable. Health data is now being used by law enforcement to criminalize abortion and undocumented immigration, making reform an urgent necessity.

AbstractAmerican capitalist medicine has produced a national healthcare system that is the most expensive – and producing the worse outcomes for patients – in the world. For many patients, social inequities and racial disparities embedded throughout the US healthcare system have only deepened and intensified over the last two decades, with very few realizing the promises made by medical technological innovation. Healthcare policy makers are turning to 'data‐driven healthcare' as a solution to these endemic problems. Yet the promise that digital technologies and data analytics will solve some of the most vexing questions in medical science, and will make healthcare more accessible, affordable, and equitable, in fact, hides the ongoing, structural inequities and injustices in health care.

An ethnographic study of the work of nurse practitioners at an outpatient care facility shows how these medical professionals must endlessly multitask to fill gaps in the US social safety net. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new focus on the essential work of nurses and the lack of resources with which they often contend is especially timely.

Two books detail how global technology giants vacuum up all the data they can get on consumers, the better to serve them on a platter to digital capitalists and colonizers.