Tag Archives: clinical data

Cloud data storage for medical records — bad idea

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“Top 10 list rejects cloud for clin­i­cal data

By George Miller

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The debate con­tin­ues over whether cloud plat­forms can secure highly sen­si­tive clin­i­cal trial data and health records. But eWeek makes no bones about its posi­tion in a top 10 list of why it’s a bad idea to store such records up there.

The 11-slide pre­sen­ta­tion encap­su­lates both well-known and less-well-known argu­ments for data stor­age via local ser­vices rather than an Internet-based, on-demand sys­tem. Among them: the highly sen­si­tive nature of the data makes it a hacker tar­get from the get-go.

Trust is a fac­tor that runs through­out the list: trust in the cloud ser­vice provider that it can and will restrict access to the barest min­i­mum, that it truly de-personalizes data, and even that it will still be in exis­tence tomorrow.

A dis­clo­sure state­ment con­cern­ing source mate­r­ial explains the anti-cloud bias. But the list remains a use­ful one.

- here’s the slide show

Related Arti­cles:
Experts: Beware of breaches in cloud com­put­ing
Cloud experts agree: choose care­fully”

Source: Fierce­Biotech IT [editors@fiercebiotechit.com] 8.23.10

Publication imbalance in Science and Medicine

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US Cur­rent pub­li­ca­tion prac­tices may dis­tort sci­ence, say researchers - 08 Oct 2008

“Open access jour­nal PLoS Med­i­cine has pub­lished a paper in its lat­est issue, accord­ing to which the cur­rent sys­tem of pub­lish­ing med­ical and sci­en­tific research pro­vides a dis­torted view of the real­ity of sci­en­tific data that are gen­er­ated in the lab­o­ra­tory and clinic. In their paper, a team of researchers — Neal Young of the National Insti­tutes of Health; John Ioan­ni­dis of Tufts Uni­ver­sity School of Med­i­cine, USA and Uni­ver­sity of Ioan­nina School of Med­i­cine, Greece; and Omar Al-Ubaydli of George Mason Uni­ver­sity — apply prin­ci­ples from the field of eco­nom­ics to present evi­dence con­sis­tent with a distortion.

Accord­ing to these researchers, there is an extreme imbal­ance between the abun­dance of sup­ply and the increas­ingly lim­ited venues for pub­li­ca­tion. The result is that only a small pro­por­tion of all research results are even­tu­ally cho­sen for pub­li­ca­tion, and these results are unrep­re­sen­ta­tive of sci­en­tists’ repeated sam­plings of the real world. The authors argue that there is a moral imper­a­tive to recon­sider how sci­en­tific data are judged and dis­sem­i­nated. The paper is avail­able online at http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0050201.

PLoS Med­i­cine is a peer-reviewed, inter­na­tional, open-access jour­nal pub­lished by the Pub­lic Library of Sci­ence (PLoS), a non­profit organ­i­sa­tion. The jour­nal pro­vides an open-access venue for pub­lish­ing impor­tant orig­i­nal research and analy­sis rel­e­vant to human health.”

Source:  Knowl­edge­s­peak Newsletter