News You Can Use – Tracking and Tracing

Tracking Apps

By Dr. Nick van Terheyden aka Dr. Nick
Twitter: @drnic1
Host of Dr. Nick: The Incrementalist – #TheIncrementalist

This months episode of “News you can Use” in the traditions of “Ask Me Anything” on HealthcareNOWRadio features news from the month of May.

Episode NOW on Demand

You can read more about the series here and the concept of keeping up with innovating in healthcare. Please send me your suggestions on topics you’d like to see covered. You can reach out direct via the contact form on my website, send me a message on LinkedIn or on my Facebook page (DrNickvT), or on Twitter tagging me (@DrNic1) and #TheIncrementalist or you can click this link to generate a ready-made tweet to fill in.

As I did last month I am talking to Craig Joseph, MD (@CraigJoseph) Chief Medical Officer at Avaap. With so much new information emerging around COVID19 we spent some time discussing tracking and tracing applications that break down into two main categories.

Apps that track your movement and attempt to determine if you came into contact with someone else that has tested positive for COVID19 or apps that track your current health status and authorize you for entry into a facility. We discuss the challenge of tracing individuals using the published API’s from Google and Apple and the importance of human oversight that is required to make sense of whatever data we can gather from these tracing tools.

For applications that offer some form of validation of users these are already in use in some healthcare facilities and we will likely find increasingly in our workplace and even in general retail. As Craig points out accessing the data on tests for individuals is a challenge as he detailed in this post “Magic Data Lakes”. Step 1 – we need to normalize the data to allow for its intelligent use and inclusion in any of these concepts.

Listen in to hear the details on testing and tracing and hear more about the @ShotsHeard group that is working hard to counter the dis and misinformation being spread online. They can always in need of help online to counter the withering attacks some physicians and practices receive when they try to post information on the importance of vaccinations.

This article was originally published on the Dr. Nick – The Incrementalist blog and is republished here with permission.