digital.ahrq.gov/sites/default/…
I know there has been a lot of anti-vaccine groups and individuals who have cited this grant report as a “gotcha” piece about corruption and attempting to hide adverse events, etcetera.
I know there has been a lot of anti-vaccine groups and individuals who have cited this grant report as a “gotcha” piece about corruption and attempting to hide adverse events, etcetera.
This was a joint AHRQ/AMIA project, and with an informatics education, I am familiar with these types of projects.
The project was originally part of President Bush’s Executive Order #13335, which created the funding for the ONC and many interoperability projects.
This report is the summary report at the end of the grant project, and describes the processes, findings, and barriers noted during the grant funding timeline.
This project was designed to interface with a data warehouse created with healthcare data generated within Massachusetts, screening healthcare data for possible adverse events to vaccines.
These types of projects are of importance, as they allow automation of data reporting, which can increase total reporting volume.
The system would then take these possible adverse events and prompt the primary care physician if they believed it to be a reaction, at which time it would be submitted to VAERS.
The system wasn’t designed to identify the severity of the possible adverse event, and therefore we can’t ascertain the severity or lack thereof of the AEs that were identified. There was also no definitive testing or calibration of the system to even see if the algorithm worked.
The thoughts and concepts behind this algorithm/system are very interesting and could be leveraged for many things in a data scientists/informatics individual’s mind.
So why didn’t we validate and leverage this technology? To best understand this, we really need to look at the political and health information technology policy shifts that occurred during this time.
When George Bush started the ONC in 2004, the two main goals were to implement EHRs for every healthcare organization/every patient and for this system to have interoperability. When Obama became president in 2008, we see the enactment of the ACA and the HITECH Act in 2010.
The HITECH act removed almost all interoperability funding, and instead focused the HIT money on features which is better known as Meaningful Use. This was a major shift in policy in the informatics funding world, as funding shifted away from interoperability to functionality.
When you look at the end date of this grant process, the grant ended in 2010, right around the enactment of HITECH Act.
Without the funding for the project, the project stalled. As most academics know, when the funding dries up, you move on to other projects to keep the grant money flowing.
Another component of the ACA and the HITECH Act was the creation of the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute and the PCORNet. The money’s invested in common data models have significantly more bang for its buck with the research which can be done.
The research capability of the PCORNet includes Vaccine Safety research, and it functions as an adjunct to other vaccine safety monitoring systems, such as the VSD, PRISM, CISA, and VAERS.
pcori.org
pcori.org
Thus there are multiple reasons for the cessation of the study and none of those are conspiratorial. Policy changes, funding changes, and a better investment of taxpayer money is what saw the death of this grant project.
What I do find interesting, is that the code required for the project is available if someone else wanted to tinker with it or modify it’s use to other projects, so even in it’s “death” the project can still continue in other forms.
@threadreaderapp unroll please
