University of Maryland Medicine (UMM), a joint enterprise of the University of Maryland Medical School and University of Maryland Medical System, has launched the My Healthy Maryland precision medicine research study. The project aims to enroll 250,000 Maryland residents over the next decade, with a particular focus on underserved populations who experience significant health disparities. As part of the effort, researchers will collect broad health data, including genetic information, to help better understand human genomic variation and its relationship to disease and treatment. As previously reported, UMM partnered with digital health research company Vibrent Health to host the study on Vibrent’s Digital Health Research Platform, which is designed to recruit and engage diverse research participants and take in data from surveys, genomics, biosamples, electronic health records, wearables, and other sources. 

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Read more at Health IT Analytics.

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Read more at Becker’s Hospital Review.

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For some health interactions and interventions, health systems deliver care fueled by real-time, real-world data captured through digital health technology.

New research being done by the National Institutes of Health centered on precision nutrition is a recent example of how innovations in health IT are driving the way research translates into patient care.

Vibrent Health, whose data collection and engagement platform is enabling the NIH study, views precision nutrition as a crucial and growing area of health research that digital health technology can greatly enhance and accelerate.

Praduman “PJ” Jain is CEO and founder of Vibrent Health and a principal investigator in the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program. He spoke with Healthcare IT News about precision nutrition research, how digital health can help – and how his company’s technology is translating the research into patient care.

Read more at Healthcare IT News.

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The lack of diversity in health research threatens the process of medical science and the future of the healthcare industry. Researchers have long struggled to represent all groups equally in clinical research studies, something the Covid-19 pandemic helped highlight with infection and deaths rates higher for certain racial and socioeconomic classes. For example, one study showed that non-Hispanic Black people account for 34% of Covid-19 deaths, even though they only make up 12% of the population.

While the pandemic highlighted this inequity, it also provided a potential solution. Diseases impact different populations while drugs and other treatments work differently on each person. The pandemic helped accelerate the concept of precision medicine, a data-intensive process to customize care based on a person’s genetic profile. To make precision medicine and other similar initiatives work, researchers need more data on underrepresented populations.

Read more at MedCity News.

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NIH’s Children’s Inn

Health research company Vibrent Health, a small business with 150 employees in the U.S., has an in-house CSR team comprised of members of their communications team, HR and corporate executives. “As a company dedicated to improving human health through research, employees are drawn to the company’s purpose, and giving back to the community is a core value,” it said.

According to Vibrent, they contribute funds and other resources to support organizations that “makes sense.” A recent example is the National Institutes of Health’s Children’s Inn where children and their families stay who participate in NIH clinical trials. In addition, the company has donated almost a ton of food during a food drive for the Inn, made holiday gift donations to families in need and donated computers to the organization.

Read more at Forbes.

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To make social media an effective part of your study’s recruitment and engagement efforts, it’s important to avoid making five common mistakes.

Want to learn what the five common mistakes are? Read more at MedCity News.

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Recruiting and retaining participants for clinical research — let alone those that represent diverse populations — has historically been a major challenge that negatively impacts all of us. Just the cost of losing and replacing participants in research trials can rack up thousands to millions of dollars per trial. In 2019, the average participant dropout rate for late-stage research trials was around 19.1% globally according to recent research results, up from 15.3% in 2012.

But the cost of enrolling and maintaining diverse research participants in medical research cuts deeper than wasted funds and often disproportionally excludes the most vulnerable, unrepresented members of our society. In 2014, some 86% of participants in clinical trials listed with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration were white. The results of a 2021 study show that white individuals accounted for 77.9% of participants in vaccine clinical trials run in the U.S. between 2011 and 2020.

Read more at Forbes.

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Praduman “PJ” Jain, CEO at Vibrent Health
Infectious disease research will use AI: As coronavirus becomes endemic and new pandemics emerge, it will become critical to rely on digital infrastructure and mobile apps to create crucial data sets to understand the severity of diseases and their transmission patterns. Use of machine learning and AI would be needed to analyze massive amounts of collected data to help our citizens to mitigate diseases to remain safe and enable our society to continue to function normally.

Read more at Healthcare IT Today.

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In a clinical research ecosystem that’s not known for its diversity, AI brings something meaningful to the table — but as powerful as smart tech is, it can also exacerbate the very equity problems it was made to solve.

Those problems were multifactorial and mighty even before Covid-19 exposed them globally. Most people now acknowledge the lack of diversity in study recruitment and participation, not just by race but also by other factors like disability, comorbidities and low income.

Read more at Forbes.

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