Miscellaneous
People are FINALLY paying attention to the potential of health data - it just took a global pandemic to make it happen. It's kind of a no-brainer, when you dig into it, but governments apparently needed a push. Rowan interviewed Jess Morley, Policy Lead at the Evidence Based Medicine DataLab at the University of Oxford, about her recent paper on online disinformation and how our information environments impact our health. The guiding question was: Why can we quarantine people who are sick and not bits of information that we know are 'sick'? Read the paper here: https://www.publichealthpost.org/viewpoints/health-threats-in-the-infosphere/ Follow Jess: https://twitter.com/jessRmorley And the DataLab: http://www.thedatalab.org/ Happily, there is actually some legislation on the horizon that could mitigate at least some of this problem. Warren takes us on a deep dive into the EU and UK Government's response to disinformation and online harms, including a full breakdown of the Tory governments recent proposals to regulate online harm - a rare instance of something the podcast can broadly get behind. Get the full UK paper here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fact-sheet-online-harms-full-government-response In general, healthcare needs to be modernised - but not in the way that Tories tend to put it. We don't mean more cuts, more manager or more external consultants. We mean making use of the kinds of data that have become core parts of most other sectors. As Jess put it, there is a lot more we could be doing with health data if it wasn't being handled in Excel!