6 articles found

Welcome Letter from the Editor | Open Access

Letter from the Editorial team

Welcome Letter from the Editor | Open Access

3 March 2025

This is the official Letter from the Editor for Volume 1, Issue 1 of The ConductScience Journal. In this inaugural note, the Editor-in-Chief introduces the journal’s mission to modernize scientific publishing by promoting transparency, data integration, and reusability

Shuhan He

Advocating for a White Blood Cell Emoji: A Novel Approach to Enhancing Public Health Communication.

Perspective

Advocating for a White Blood Cell Emoji: A Novel Approach to Enhancing Public Health Communication.

24 February 2025

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and recent rise in monkeypox cases globally, infectious disease has become a major topic of public attention. However, there still remains a public stigma associated with infectious disease, limiting public understanding of the subject and leading to overall resistance to seek medical assistance for illness. Emojis, which are universally used symbols to communicate important topics, could play an important role in encouraging conversation surrounding infectious disease online. Specifically, white blood cells (WBCs) are a vital part of the immune system and could play an important part in the communication of infectious disease online. Hence, we encourage the infectious disease community to come together and advocate for the inclusion of the WBC emoji into Unicode, the corporation that is responsible for the standardization of emojis across all devices.

Suhanee Mitragotri

Allison Goff

Utilization of Structured Data to Improve Visibility of Digital Health Websites

Original Research

Utilization of Structured Data to Improve Visibility of Digital Health Websites

24 February 2025

Objective This article proposes a framework to design, organize, and implement structured data, a standardized format to embed metadata into websites, to improve visibility of information from digital health websites. Methods We described the utility of structured data to improve visibility of websites and a proposed framework to design and evaluate context-specific structured data using existing structured data schemas. Results To motivate the increased use of structured data of health websites, we 1) highlight the considerations of implementing structured data in websites, 2) outline a framework and case study to build structured data, and 3) describe practical methods to implement structured data into healthcare websites. Discussion The use of structured data in healthcare websites can increase the visibility of health resources through search engine optimization (SEO), show rich, personalized results to target users, and allow the website to serve as a living digital directory of resource information for patients. Conclusion Further quality improvement and implementation science research is needed to promote the systematic uptake of structured data as a tool to deliver personalized healthcare information to patients.

Suhanee Mitragotri

David Chen

Jarone Lee

Broadband Access and Health Outcomes in FCC Priority Counties: A Longitudinal Analysis

Original Research

Broadband Access and Health Outcomes in FCC Priority Counties: A Longitudinal Analysis

24 February 2025

Background: The relationship between broadband access and health outcomes is an emerging field of interest within public health research. In an increasingly digital world, it is important to understand how to best allocate broadband resources to maximize health impact and decrease health disparities. This study specifically investigates how levels of broadband connectivity are associated with health metrics for conditions such as diabetes, obesity, and preventable hospitalizations in counties identified as ‘priority’ by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) due to their low broadband access and high rates of chronic disease. Objective: To understand the longitudinal relationship between broadband access and health outcomes in priority counties, specifically focusing on diabetes, obesity, and preventable hospitalizations. Methods: This study analyzes data from 171 FCC priority counties from 2013-2020. Using regression models, we explore how broadband metrics, including broadband subscriptions and download speed, along with county characteristics such as rurality and persistent poverty, predict health outcomes. Health outcomes of interest include diabetes prevalence, obesity rates, and preventable hospitalizations. Results: A 1 percentage point increase in broadband subscriptions was associated with a 0.5% decrease in the odds of diabetes prevalence (odds ratio [OR] 0.995, 95% Confidence Interval [CI] 0.992-0.997). No significant relationship was found between broadband and obesity rates and preventable hospitalizations. County disparities were evident, with counties experiencing persistent poverty showing a 10% increase in the odds of diabetes prevalence (OR 1.100, 95% CI 1.062-1.140) and a 20.3% increase in preventable hospitalizations (β=1.203, 95% CI 1.131-1.280, P<.001). Rural counties were predicted to have a 17.6% increase in the odds of obesity prevalence (OR 1.176, 95% CI 1.127-1.228) and a 15.1% increase in the odds of diabetes prevalence (OR 1.151, 95% CI 1.111-1.191). Conclusions: Our data suggests that increased access to broadband may be correlated with decreased rates of diabetes in FCC priority counties. The study highlights the variable relationship between broadband access and health outcomes and acknowledges health disparities in rural, persistent poverty counties. This analysis provides a baseline for understanding the dynamics between broadband and health in critical need areas. Such insights highlight how expanding broadband infrastructure, especially rural and impoverished regions where disease burden is high, may help reduce health disparities and improve healthcare service access. Future data can be incorporated to clarify causality and model how the adoption of broadband infrastructure may take time to facilitate telehealth usage and ultimately support improved health outcomes, and how these dynamics may differ depending on county characteristics.

Reese Green

Max von Franque

Melissa Martinez

+1

A Scoping Review of Health AI Controversies in the Grey Literature from 2013-2022

Original Research

A Scoping Review of Health AI Controversies in the Grey Literature from 2013-2022

22 February 2025

Objective This study aimed to 1) quantify the number of controversies related to health artificial intelligence (AI) development and deployment over the past 10 years, and 2) categorize health AI controversies by theme. Materials and Methods This study is a scoping review. We queried GoogleNews for articles meeting pre-specified inclusion and exclusion criteria related to health AI controversies. A total of 7508 articles were queried, with 76 articles ultimately meeting criteria. Articles were quantitatively evaluated for timing and coded according to both organizational involvement and the themes of the controversies described in the article. Results Of the 76 articles, 55% were published in 2019 and 2022. No articles were published before 2016. Privacy, AI accuracy, and AI bias were the most common themes. Oversight and conflict of interest were the least common themes. Google, Babylon, and Optum were the most discussed companies. Conclusions The results demonstrate concrete evidence for many of the theoretical concerns highlighted by patient and physician surveys as well as scholarly ethics research. However, the volume of articles over the past 10 years was small. It is possible that this study was too narrow in scope, that health AI has actually not yielded a large volume of controversial events, or that news organizations have insufficiently investigated potential health AI controversies. Further research is required to develop a more complete understanding of controversial activities in health AI.

Joshua M Faber

Chad Teven

Arturo Francisco Balaguer Townsend

A Cryptographic Method for Reproducible, Transparent Randomization of Clinical Trial Design

Original Research

A Cryptographic Method for Reproducible, Transparent Randomization of Clinical Trial Design

23 December 2024

There remains difficulty in creating adequate and equitable protocols and mechanisms to guide the use of randomization to assign participants to different treatment arms in a randomized clinical trial. A trustworthy randomization system should be correct, reproducible, confidential, and transparent, to ensure fairness, secure public trust, and protect both the recruited participants and the trial supervisors. We propose the design and implementation of an accountable and trustworthy randomization approach using a verifiable pseudorandom shuffling mechanism for the purposes of simple randomization in clinical trials. The solution has been deployed in the form of a user-accessible, no-download website for ready access to the public.

Ian Miers

David Chen

Colin McSwiggen

+8

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