Health Tech Hub Vol. 14 — Your Weekly Reads in Medicine and Health Tech

1. AI and the Democratization of Healthcare— This article makes the case for AI and the use of longitudinal data as well as “crowd wisdom” from tens of thousands of doctors and patients to help democratize healthcare.

How To Democratize Healthcare: AI Gives Everyone The Very Best Doctor

See also:

https://figure1.com/

https://www.crowdmed.com/

2. Inequality a more important determinant of health than wealth — Can relative inequality rates within a country be more indicative of health outcomes than relative poverty rates? It turns out that individuals in high-inequality environments like America are more prone to chronic disease than those in lower inequality nations with more poverty. When people believe that they are poorer than those around them, this leads to detrimental health outcomes.

Income inequality is changing how we think, live, and die

3. Vaccinations and Viral Evolution — Vaccinations have been a mainstay for human, animal, and plant defense against infectious diseases. However, it is questionable whether we are “over-vaccinating” and promoting proliferation of the rarest viruses. Vaccination practices remain controversial as a sustainable booster for immune defense.

How Vaccines Can Drive Pathogens to Evolve | Quanta Magazine

See also:

http://news.mit.edu/2011/preventing-flu-vaccine-mutations-1220

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0017445