This one (via Science Magazine).
Jason—a secretive group of Cold War science advisers—is fighting to survive in the 21st centuryI posted about that Jason nearly five years ago, in the context of EHR "interoperability."
By Ann FinkbeinerJun. 27, 2019
After 59 years of service, Jason, the famed science advisory group, was being fired, and it didn't know why. On 29 March, the exclusive and shadowy group of some 65 scientists received a letter from the Department of Defense (DOD) saying it had just over a month to pack up its files and wind down its affairs. "It was a total shock," said Ellen Williams, Jason's vice chair and a physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park. "I had no idea what the heck was going on."
The letter terminated Jason's contract with DOD's Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (USDR&E) in Arlington, Virginia, which was Jason's contractual home—the conduit through which it was paid for all of its government work. So, in effect, the letter killed off all of Jason's work for defense and nondefense agencies alike…
From the current Science Magazine article:
Expanding horizonsYeah.Interesting article, fairly long read. Apparently not paywalled.
In the past 5 years, the range of studies Jason has done for nondefense agencies has broadened. HHS, for instance, has sponsored Jason only since 2013. The first of its three studies for the agency proposed an information systems architecture that would allow electronic health records to be operable across all health systems. In response, HHS formed a Jason Task Force that helped implement the report's recommendations through something called the Argonaut Project. "The health community has a unique sense of humor," says Teresa Zayas-Cabán, chief scientist at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at HHS in Washington, D.C.
The next HHS studies, in 2014 and 2017, were broader. One was about how data not in electronic health records—environmental data, data from health apps and fitness devices, social media data—could be used to improve personal health without threatening privacy. The other, Keller says, studied how to apply artificial intelligence (AI) to health, given the problems of uneven data quality and opaque, irreproducible AI models. Zayas-Cabán says one reason she likes Jason is the group's independence. The field of health care has "many powerful and entrenched interests," she says, "so independent and expert study of our issues can be extremely valuable."...
Not a lot of progress I can see on the interoperability front across the past five years. I'm not alone.
What Is Taking So Long For Meaningful Interoperability In Clinical Research?
By Alethea Wieland, founder and president, Clinical Research Strategies, LLC
Three decades ago when I entered the profession of clinical research, our workplace equipment extended to typewriters, white-out, mimeographs, hand-written documents, rubber erasers, pens, label makers, and fax and copy machines. Rows of massive, locked, fire-proof filing cabinets storing millions of papers for a nationally funded research program lined record rooms, hallways, and every spare corner of the offices. Most of us felt rewarded when we could use a typewriter with a correction key despite one’s typing skills being firmly judged by the illegible mistakes in the carbon copies.
Fast-forward to the present day, when countless digital technological advances, data warehouses, and hardware and software programs have made our jobs more repeatable, less erroneous, and faster. Yet, we still have not made significant progress on interoperability between disparate electronic systems such as routine, seamless, and secure data transfers from electronic health records (EHRs) to electronic data capture (EDC) systems…
More to come...
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