CNU Library Blog

Title: Sharing Health Data: The Why, the Will, and the Way Forward

Authors: National Academy of Medicine, The Learning Health System Series, Claudia Grossmann, Peak Sen Chua, Mahnoor Ahmed, Sarah M. Greene

Publication Information: Washington, DC: National Academies Press. 2022.

Start reading: Academic eBook Collection.

Description: Sharing health data and information across stakeholder groups is the bedrock of a learning health system. As data and information are increasingly combined across various sources, their generative value to transform health, health care, and health equity increases significantly. Health data have proven their centrality in guiding action to change the course of individual and population health, if properly stewarded and used. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, both data and a lack of data illuminated profound shortcomings that affected health care and health equity. Yet, a silver lining of the pandemic was a surge in collaboration among data holders in public health, health care, and technology firms, suggesting that an evolution in health data sharing is visible and tangible. This Special Publication features some of these novel data-sharing collaborations, and has been developed to provide practical context and implementation guidance that is critical to advancing the lessons learned identified in its parent NAM Special Publication, Health Data Sharing: Building a Foundation of Stakeholder Trust. The focus of this publication is to identify and describe exemplar groups to dispel the myth that sharing health data more broadly is impossible and illuminate the innovative approaches that are being taken to make progress in the current environment. It also serves as a resource for those waiting in the wings, showing how barriers were addressed and harvesting lessons and insights from those on the front lines. In the meantime, knowledge is already available to foster better health care and health outcomes. The examples described in this volume suggest how intentional attention to health data sharing can enable unparalleled advances, securing a healthier and more equitable future for all.

Title: Ethically Challenged: Private Equity Storms US Health Care.

Author: Laura Katz Olson.

Publication info: Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2022. 

Location: Academic eBook Collection. 

Description: Revealing the dark truth about the impact of predatory private equity firms on American health care.Won Gold from the Axiom Book Award in the Category of Business Ethics, the Benjamin Franklin Awards by the Independent Book Publishers Association and the North American Book Award in the Catergory of Business Finance, Finalist of the American Book Fest Best Book Social Change and Current Events by the American Book FestPrivate equity (PE) firms pervade all aspects of our modern lives. Unlike other corporations, which generally manufacture products or provide services, they leverage considerable debt and other people's money to buy and sell businesses with the sole aim of earning supersized profits in the shortest time possible. With a voracious appetite and trillions of dollars at its disposal, the private equity industry is now buying everything from your opioid treatment center to that helicopter that helps swoop you up from a car crash site. It may even control how and when you can get your kidney dialysis. In Ethically Challenged, Laura Katz Olson describes how PE firms are gobbling up physician and dental practices; home care and hospice agencies; substance abuse, eating disorder, and autism services; urgent care facilities; and emergency medical transportation. With a sharp eye on cost and quality of care, Olson investigates the PE industry's impact on these essential services. She explains how PE firms pile up massive debt on their investment targets and how they bleed these enterprises with assorted fees and dividends for themselves. Throughout, she argues that public pension funds, which provide the preponderance of equity for PE buyouts, tend to ignore the pesky fact that their money may be undermining the very health care system their workers and retirees rely on.Weaving together insights from interviews with business owners and experts, newspaper articles, purchased data sets, and industry publications, Olson offers a unique perspective and appreciation of the significance of PE investments in health care. The first book to comprehensively address private equity and health care, Ethically Challenged raises the curtain on an industry notorious for its secrecy, exposing the nefarious side of its maneuvers.

Title: Graphic Medicine Manifesto.

Published: 2015. 

Available: as an eBook in Academic eBook Collection.

 

Description: "This inaugural volume in the graphic medicine series establishes the principles of graphic medicine and begins to map the field. The volume combines scholarly essays by members of the editorial team with previously unpublished visual narratives by Ian Williams and MK Czerwiec, and it includes arresting visual work from a wide range of graphic medicine practitioners. The book's first section, featuring essays by Scott Smith and Susan Squier, argues that as a new area of scholarship, research on graphic medicine has the potential to challenge the conventional boundaries of academic disciplines, raise questions about their foundations, and reinvigorate literary scholarship—and the notion of the literary text—for a broader audience. The second section, incorporating essays by Michael Green and Kimberly Myers, demonstrates that graphic medicine narratives can engage members of the health professions with literary and visual representations and symbolic practices that offer patients, family members, physicians, and other caregivers new ways to experience and work with the complex challenges of the medical experience. The final section, by Ian Williams and MK Czerwiec, focuses on the practice of creating graphic narratives, iconography, drawing as a social practice, and the nature of comics as visual rhetoric. A conclusion (in comics form) testifies to the diverse and growing graphic medicine community. Two valuable bibliographies guide readers to comics and scholarly works relevant to the field."

Article-linking websites online can help you find relevant articles from one article's DOI. Scroll through these slides to learn more about LitMaps, Citation Gecko, and Connected Papers.

Academic research is an ongoing conversation between authors. by Sadie Davenport

Title: Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America

By: Mary Otto. The New Press. 2017. 

Available in our Academic eBook Collection. 

Description: "'Show me your teeth,' the great naturalist Georges Cuvier is credited with saying, 'and I will tell you who you are.' In this shattering new work, veteran health journalist Mary Otto looks inside America's mouth, revealing unsettling truths about our unequal society. Teeth takes readers on a disturbing journey into America's silent epidemic of oral disease, exposing the hidden connections between tooth decay and stunted job prospects, low educational achievement, social mobility, and the troubling state of our public health. Otto's subjects include the pioneering dentist who made Shirley Temple and Judy Garland's teeth sparkle on the silver screen and helped create the all-American image of 'pearly whites'; Deamonte Driver, the young Maryland boy whose tragic death from an abscessed tooth sparked congressional hearings; and a marketing guru who offers advice to dentists on how to push new and expensive treatments and how to keep Medicaid patients at bay. In one of its most disturbing findings, Teeth reveals that toothaches are not an occasional inconvenience, but rather a chronic reality for millions of people, including disproportionate numbers of the elderly and people of color. Many people, Otto reveals, resort to prayer to counteract the uniquely devastating effects of dental pain. Otto also goes back in time to understand the roots of our predicament in the history of dentistry, showing how it became separated from mainstream medicine, despite a century of growing evidence that oral health and general bodily health are closely related.Muckraking and paradigm-shifting, Teeth exposes for the first time the extent and meaning of our oral health crisis. It joins the small shelf of books that change the way we view society and ourselves—and will spark an urgent conversation about why our teeth matter."

Review: "An NPR Best Book of 2017, '[Teeth is]... more than an exploration of a two-tiered system—it is a call for sweeping, radical change.'—New York Times Book Review.

Title: What Patients Teach: The Everyday Ethics of Health Care.

By: Larry R. Churchill; Joseph B. Fanning; David Schenck. Oxford University Press. 2013.

Available in our Academic eBook Collection. 

Description: "Being a patient is a unique interpersonal experience but it is also a universal human experience. The relationships formed when we are patients can also teach some of life's most important lessons, and these relationships provide a special window into ethics, especially the ethics of healthcare professionals. This book answers two basic questions: As patients see it, what things allow relationships with healthcare providers to become therapeutic? What can this teach us about healthcare ethics? This volume presents detailed descriptions and analyses of 50 interviews with 58 patients, representing a wide spectrum of illnesses and clinician specialties. The authors argue that the structure, rhythm, and horizon of routine patient care are ultimately grounded in patient vulnerability and clinician responsiveness. From the short interview segments, the longer vignettes and the full patient stories presented here emerge the neglected dimensions of healthcare and healthcare ethics. What becomes visible is an ethics of everyday interdependence, with mutual responsibilities that follow from this moral symbiosis. Both professional expressions of healthcare ethics and the field of bioethics need to be informed and reformed by this distinctive, more patient-centered, turn in how we understand both patient care as a whole and the ethics of care more specifically. The final chapters present revised codes of ethics for health professionals, as well as the implications for medical and health professions education." 

Pierre Fauchard is remembered as "the father of modern dentistry” for his efforts to preserve people’s teeth. 

Before Fauchard, dentistry was not an active, medical discipline. Instead of dentists there were tooth pullers, who used tools called “pelicans” to pull teeth out of people's mouths. These tools often pulled out healthy teeth and part of one’s jaw along with the bad tooth. These tooth pullers learned their skill through trial & error.

Then, in 1728, Fauchard wrote & published “The Surgeon Dentist,” which depicted illustrations of dental anatomy, 103 mouth diseases, and surgical tools to use in dental procedures. Many of the ideas he wrote in this book were previously unheard of in medicine. Fauchard also found that kids’ teeth fall out and are replaced, instead of the commonly believed theory that people spontaneously generate new teeth. He also argued that sugar caused tooth decay and motivated people to change their diets. He continued to fight against inexperienced and harmful “dentists” and tooth pullers until his death. Fauchard's work inspired a new generation of dentists in the 18th century who continued to study teeth and diseases of the mouth. His book was finally published in English in 1946 by Lilian Lindsay, a medical science historian. 

The images above are excerpts from Pierre Fauchard's book, "The Surgeon Dentist," made publicly available by the "Wellcome Collection, a free museum and library that aims to challenge how we all think and feel about health." (Read more about this group at the link below.)

Read more: 

• Wellcome Collection: Images from Fauchard's book
• Pierre Fauchard Academy
• Article from the British Medical Journal: "Pierre Fauchard: the 'Father of Modern Dentistry'"

Happy birthday to Louis Lewin, a German pharmacologist who lived from 1850 to 1929. In 1881, Lewin wrote the book Die Nebenwirkungen der Arzneimittel, which was translated to English as The Untoward Effects of Drugs: A Pharmacological and Clinical Manual. It was the first book of its kind. 

Louis Lewin also indirectly contributed to an ongoing debate about dental amalgam fillings: do they cause mercury poisoning, or not? One of his patients was chemistry professor Alfred Stock, who died from mercury poisoning (allegedly from occupational exposure, not from his fillings). While determining the cause of his poisoning, Lewin noted that his dental fillings were a possible source. Stock wrote against further use of amalgam, which refueled the ongoing debate on the topic in Germany. 

Dental amalgam fillings do contain small amounts of mercury. Amalgam is an alloy of mercury which uniquely (and at a low cost) produces the versatility and strength required to fill and support a decaying tooth's shape. Read more in the links below! 

Read more:

• About Louis Lewin on his Wikipedia page.
• About his 1881 book, Die Nebenwirkungen der Arzneimittel, here. 
• Stock's insistence that doctors cease usage of amalgam is translated to English here. 
• About the history, science, and significance of dental amalgam fillings in this article in NCBI.