MediLinker: a blockchain-based decentralized health information management platform for patient-centric healthcare.

Patients' control over how their health information is stored has been an ongoing issue in health informatics. Currently, most patients' health information is stored in centralized but siloed health information systems of healthcare institutions, rarely connected to or interoperable with other institutions outside of their specific health system. This centralized approach to the storage of health information is susceptible to breaches, though it can be mitigated using technology that allows for decentralized access.

Technical Design and Development of A Self-Sovereign Identity Management Platform for Patient-Centric Health Care Using Blockchain Technology.

Objective: Clinical data in the United States are highly fragmented, stored in numerous different databases, and are defined by service providers or clinical specialties rather than by individuals or their families. As a result, linking or aggregating a complete record for a patient is a major technological, legal, and operational challenge. One of the factors that has made clinical data integration so difficult to achieve is the lack of a universal ID for everyone.

Clinical, Organizational and Regulatory, and Ethical and Social (CORES) Issues and Recommendations on Blockchain Deployment for Healthcare: Evidence from Experts.

Objective: While existing research by our team has demonstrated the feasibility of building a decentralized identity management application ("MediLinker") for health information, there are implementation issues related to testing such blockchain-based health applications in real-world clinical settings. In this study, we identified clinical, organizational and regulatory, and ethical and social (CORES) issues, including recommendations, associated with deploying MediLinker, and blockchain in general, for clinical testing.

Methods: CORES issues and recommendations were identified through a focus group with 11 academic, industry, and government experts on March 26, 2021.

Pandemics are catalysts of scientific novelty: Evidence from COVID-19.

Scientific novelty drives the efforts to invent new vaccines and solutions during the pandemic. First-time collaboration and international collaboration are two pivotal channels to expand teams' search activities for a broader scope of resources required to address the global challenge, which might facilitate the generation of novel ideas. Our analysis of 98,981 coronavirus papers suggests that scientific novelty measured by the BioBERT model that is pretrained on 29 million PubMed articles, and first-time collaboration increased after the outbreak of COVID-19, and international collaboration witnessed a sudden decrease.

Qualitative and quantitative approach to assess of the potential for automating administrative tasks in general practice.

Objective: To identify the extent to which administrative tasks carried out by primary care staff in general practice could be automated.

Design: A mixed-method design including ethnographic case studies, focus groups, interviews and an online survey of automation experts.

Setting: Three urban and three rural general practice health centres in England selected for differences in list size and organisational characteristics.

The social informatics of knowledge.

In the Introduction to this special issue on the Social Informatics of Knowledge, the editors of the issue reflect on the history of the term "social informatics" and how the articles in this issue both reflect and depart from the original concept. We examine how social informatics researchers have studied knowledge, computerization, and the workplace, and how all of those have evolved over time. We describe the process by which articles were included, how they help us understand the field of social informatics scholarship today, and reflect briefly on what the future of the field holds.

The Future of Health Care: Protocol for Measuring the Potential of Task Automation Grounded in the National Health Service Primary Care System.

Background: Recent advances in technology have reopened an old debate on which sectors will be most affected by automation. This debate is ill served by the current lack of detailed data on the exact capabilities of new machines and how they are influencing work. Although recent debates about the future of jobs have focused on whether they are at risk of automation, our research focuses on a more fine-grained and transparent method to model task automation and specifically focus on the domain of primary health care.

Patterns of regional brain activity in alcohol-dependent subjects.

Background: Electroencephalographic (EEG) measures of hemispheric asymmetry in anterior brain activity have been related to a variety of indices of psychopathology and emotionality. However, little is known about patterns of frontal asymmetry in alcohol-dependent (AD) samples. It is also unclear whether psychiatric comorbidity in AD subjects accounts for additional variance in frontal asymmetry, beyond a diagnosis of AD alone.

A family study of alcohol dependence: coaggregation of multiple disorders in relatives of alcohol-dependent probands.

Background: Alcohol dependence tends to aggregate within families. We analyzed data from the family collection of the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism to quantify familial aggregation using several different criterion sets. We also assessed the aggregation of other psychiatric disorders in the same sample to identify areas of possible shared genetic vulnerability.

Genome-wide scan and conditional analysis in bipolar disorder: evidence for genomic interaction in the National Institute of Mental Health genetics initiative bipolar pedigrees.

Background: In 1989 the National Institute of Mental Health began a collaborative effort to identify genes for bipolar disorder. The first 97 pedigrees showed evidence of linkage to chromosomes 1, 6, 7, 10, 16, and 22 (Nurnberger et al 1997). An additional 56 bipolar families have been genotyped, and the combined sample of 153 pedigrees studied.

Is there a genetic relationship between alcoholism and depression?

The Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA) seeks to identify genes contributing to alcoholism and related traits (i.e., phenotypes), including depression.

Genomewide linkage analyses of bipolar disorder: a new sample of 250 pedigrees from the National Institute of Mental Health Genetics Initiative.

We conducted genomewide linkage analyses on 1,152 individuals from 250 families segregating for bipolar disorder and related affective illnesses. These pedigrees were ascertained at 10 sites in the United States, through a proband with bipolar I affective disorder and a sibling with bipolar I or schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type. Uniform methods of ascertainment and assessment were used at all sites.