FHI's Week in Review

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Volume IV, Issue 33

Aug. 14 , 2017

Blockchain technology for EHRs

Daniel Gomez Ramos reminds us in an 8.12.17 KevinMD blog post:

Over the course of a few years, hacking on a broad scale has been a common occurrence and Protected Health Information (PHI) is considered a high priority target by such malicious actions.

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According to Mr. Ramos:

An answer to this problem may depend on blockchain technology, which has been discussed in many recent articles. This type of technology is used for digitalized currency such as Bitcoin, and will also be used in a global identification system innovated by a company called id2020, who is partnered with the United Nations. As a brief description of the technology, it is a string of databases that is incorruptible and is continually redesigned, by which multiple users can add novel information at different locations in real time. If a group or individual were to try hacking an EHR system that is tethered to a blockchain system, then they would have to hack each separate database by chronology.

What happened to Zika?

Daniel Chang reports for the Miami Herald on Aug 11, 2017:

A year after the first outbreak of Zika in Miami, the mosquito-borne virus's once-menacing march has slowed to a crawl, with Florida health officials reporting fewer infections in 2017 than last year and no local cases so far.

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According to the article:

"It's very encouraging where we are now compared to last year," said Dr. Henry Walke, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's incident manager for Zika response. "We're almost into the second week in August and we only have one [locally transmitted] case" in Texas...The CDC's official classification for Florida's Zika outbreak is "interrupted," which means that no new mosquito-borne cases have been reported for three months since the last confirmed case. But that doesn't mean the virus won't return.

Remarkable Increases in Alcohol Use

Bridget F. Grant, PhD, S. Patricia Chou, PhD, Tulshi D. Saha, PhD, et al report on American alcohol use in an August 9, 2017 JAMA Psychiatry post. The authors studied 12-month prevalence of alcohol use, high-risk drinking, and DSM-IV alcohol use disorder between 2001-2002 and 2012-2013. According to the authors:

In this study of data from face-to-face interviews conducted in 2 nationally representative surveys of U.S. adults, including the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions and the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions III, 12-month alcohol use (11.2%), high-risk drinking (29.9%), and DSM-IV alcohol use disorder (49.4%) increased for the total U.S. population and, with few exceptions, across socio-demographic subgroups.

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The authors point out the myriad health issues associated with alcohol misuse:

Alcohol use and specifically high-risk drinking, which often leads to alcohol use disorder (AUD), are significant contributors to the burden of disease in the United States and worldwide. High-risk drinking and AUD are important risk factors for morbidity and mortality from fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, stroke, liver cirrhosis, several types of cancer and infections, pancreatitis, type 2 diabetes and various injuries. High-risk drinking and AUD are disabling, are associated with numerous psychiatric co-morbidities and impaired productivity and interpersonal functioning, and place psychological and financial burdens on society as a whole and on those who misuse alcohol, their families, friends, and coworkers, as well as through motor vehicle crashes, violence, and property crime.

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