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UK scientists welcome government’s new technology plan but say more funding needed | Science

Scientists have welcomed the launch of a 10-point government plan designed to help cement the UK’s place as a global science and technology superpower, but said more funding would be needed to achieve this goal – including securing full association with EU programmes.

The science and technology framework, launched on Monday, is the first major output of the recently created Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. It outlines 10 vital actions necessary to foster the right conditions for industry, innovation and scientific research to deliver highly paid jobs, boost economic growth in cutting-edge industries, and improve people’s lives.

These include identifying, pursuing and achieving strategic advantage in leading industries, boosting private and public investment in research and development, and financing innovative science and technology startups and companies.

Also announced was an additional £370m in funding – including £250m to build on the UK’s leadership in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and synthetic biology.

Michelle Donelan, the science, innovation and technology secretary, said: “Innovation and technology are our future. They hold the keys to everything from raising productivity and wages, to transforming healthcare, reducing energy prices and ultimately creating jobs and economic growth in the UK, providing the financial firepower allowing us to spend more on public services.”

Prof Sir Adrian Smith, president of the Royal Society, said the announcement was a clear signal that research and innovation sat at the heart of the government’s agenda for productivity and growth, and it was reassuring to see a plan focused on cementing the UK’s place as a science and technology superpower.

Nevertheless, vital for this would be securing access to the EU’s flagship Horizon Europe programme. Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, last week signalled that this might be possible under the latest post-Brexit trading deal between the EU and UK – but this is not yet guaranteed. Even then, it could take several years for funding and participation to return to pre-Brexit levels.

“Today’s announcement is welcome – and one of the first steps to turning words into action must be securing full association to the EU funding programmes,” Smith said. “That represents the base of a globally focused UK science sector. The extension of the funding underwrite announced today is a welcome intervention, but it is yet another sticking plaster, when the ultimate goal needs to be speedy association now that the barriers to this have been removed by the EU. We need to see a firm commitment from the prime minister to delivering full association.”

Dr Tim Bradshaw, chief executive of the Russell Group of universities, said the £370m of new funding was also far short of £1.6bn in funding that had been earmarked for research collaborations with the European Union, but which the Treasury recently announced it was taking back. The funding has not been spent because of holdups caused by the dispute over the Northern Ireland protocol.

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“In addition to investment, collaboration is the other vital ingredient for world-class research,” Bradshaw said. “Now the political roadblocks that have held up the UK’s association to Horizon Europe have been removed, the government’s top priority should be to finalise the agreement that was put in place over two years ago.”

Also published on Monday was an independent review of the UK’s research, development and innovation landscape by Sir Paul Nurse, director of the Francis Crick Institute in London. It concluded that funding, particularly provided by government, was limited, and below that of other competitive nations. The way the UK delivers and supports research is also “not optimal,” it said.

“My review of the research, development and innovation landscape makes a range of recommendations across the whole RDI endeavour, which if adopted together, provides a blueprint for government to make the UK a genuine science superpower,” Nurse said.

Why direct primary care may be the future, and what technology is needed to support it

Homebound individuals usually struggle with intricate health care problems amongst the most high-priced in health care. Further more, they normally encounter wellbeing equity issues relevant to social determinants of wellbeing, which include the means to stop by a clinic, healthcare facility or doctor’s workplace.

Several in health care consider sufferers are likely to be happiest and healthiest when they’re in the house. This expanding awareness could potentially gasoline a pattern towards shifting immediate primary treatment into the house.

McKinsey estimates up to $265 billion truly worth of treatment services (symbolizing up to 25{4224f0a76978c4d6828175c7edfc499fc862aa95a2f708cd5006c57745b2aaca} of the complete value of care) for Medicare rate-for-service and Medicare Benefit beneficiaries could change from common facilities to the house by 2025.

Providing wanted health care expert services and giving help with everyday functions needs a staff-primarily based method to direct key care that includes nontraditional providers, stated Lynn Carroll, chief running officer at HSBlox, a seller of health and fitness IT for the administration of value-based treatment applications.

Carroll talks about what immediate most important treatment is how direct most important care has the prospective to make far better results, an improved affected person knowledge and decreased prices and how coordinating treatment, services and reimbursements by a electronic infrastructure can likely boost wellness fairness for vulnerable populations.

Q. For those unfamiliar, what specifically is immediate main care and what does it entail?

A. Direct most important treatment is an choice care and payment design that removes price-for-support payments and 3rd-celebration billing. In its place, sufferers fork out their most important treatment vendors a flat yearly or regular cost for regimen expert services, this sort of as quarterly exams and program lab tests, as nicely as increased expert services such as telehealth and property-primarily based visits.

DPC is getting more and more preferred among people and self-insured companies involved about rising health care charges and among suppliers eager to minimize administrative burdens, according to the “Developments in Direct Principal Treatment Report” from Trace Overall health.

The good results of DPCs relies upon seriously on a potent client/PCP romance. People in a DPC design typically have higher access to their physicians/healthcare teams in a a lot more effortless and cost-effective method than they would less than traditional billing systems.

The DPC design can assistance more compact procedures stabilize their revenue streams even though doing away with administrative burdens related to coding, billing and submitting claims with insurers. This provides them additional time to devote with sufferers and allows them to lessen costs.

Q. Why do you really feel direct main treatment is a need to for the potential of health care?

A. The pandemic uncovered a good deal of inherent flaws in the U.S. healthcare procedure, which has accelerated the adoption of new treatment shipping and delivery types these types of as telehealth and property-primarily based treatment. DPC is a practical alternate payment model for companies with scaled-down practices who want to stay away from administrative and reimbursement headaches.

Another purpose DPC will be a need to going forward is that it is really a client-centric care model, and healthcare people are extra demanding than at any time. They want customized and hassle-free support from their PCPs, and they will not want any billing surprises.

At last, the inherently preventive character of treatment less than the DPC model aligns perfectly with the plans of price-based mostly care to enhance affected individual experience and health and fitness outcomes, tackle medical professional tiredness and effectively-getting, and incorporate well being fairness, all even though lowering health care costs.

Q. How can direct main treatment deliver superior outcomes, an enhanced client working experience and decreased costs?

A. DPC creates superior outcomes simply because key care vendors can invest extra time with clients. This will allow them to inquire much more inquiries, interact in conversations about conditions and achievable remedies, and conduct simple testing in the workplace and even in a patient’s residence.

The extra acquainted a medical professional is with a affected person – which includes comprehending the social determinants that may perhaps impact that patient’s lifetime and health and fitness – the better the odds of a greater final result.

DPC enhances the client practical experience by way of superior results and greater benefit. Investigation exhibits that DPC members can schedule appointments with their vendors within just just one day, wait significantly less than 5 minutes in the DPC workplace, and commit almost 40 minutes on ordinary with their vendors, vs . 15 or 16 minutes with a common PCP.

In a recent review analyzing the impact of DPC on health and fitness outcomes and expenses, DPC customers experienced 25.5{4224f0a76978c4d6828175c7edfc499fc862aa95a2f708cd5006c57745b2aaca} decrease healthcare facility admissions, while the expense of ER claims was decreased by 53.6{4224f0a76978c4d6828175c7edfc499fc862aa95a2f708cd5006c57745b2aaca}. The improved outcomes, greater affected individual experience, diminished paperwork and reduced prices generated by way of DPC payment styles can aid smaller methods keep on being impartial.

Q. How can coordinating care, products and services and reimbursements by way of a electronic infrastructure improve well being fairness for susceptible populations?

A. A key ingredient of a healthier DPC apply is sturdy doing the job interactions with local community-based organizations that present nourishment counseling, transportation and other solutions addressing the social determinants of overall health that can effects patients’ life and results. Developing this style of neighborhood assistance community for vulnerable populations is essential if we want to improve health fairness and attain the objectives of value-dependent care.

A digital infrastructure is required to electric power this network of assistance suppliers. Productively integrating community-dependent corporations into a treatment network involves providers to deploy technologies that offer complicated hierarchy aid for onboarding, details capture, digitization and exchange. These technologies need to help SDOH, good quality reporting and other use situations.

The proper cloud-centered digital infrastructure can guidance the quite a few-to-many interactions necessary for coordinated treatment of sufferers. By sharing info and analytics and realigning downstream reimbursement to include equally professional medical and nonmedical companies, companies can activate a powerful group-based community of care for their people.

Observe Bill’s Hit protection on LinkedIn: Invoice Siwicki
E mail the author: bsiwicki@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.

More consensus needed over digital technology for ‘people and the planet’ |

“We have a critical possibility to establish consensus on how digital technologies can be used for the fantastic of folks and the world, even though addressing their risks,” Rosemary DiCarlo, Less than-Secretary-Common for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, told the Protection Council.

“But collective action by Member States remains crucial toward this goal”.

Electronic technologies for great

She noted that social media has reworked human rights and humanitarian advocacy, “making it possible to mobilize individuals all around the environment swiftly and proficiently all over problems demanding urgent action”.

In keeping peace and security, technological developments have enhanced the capacity to detect crises, superior pre-placement humanitarian help, and develop details-pushed peacebuilding tools, she mentioned.

And in conflict avoidance, new digital tools have strengthened peace-generating and peacebuilding, offering much better information and facts and early warning facts, Ms. DiCarlo additional.

She pointed to the UN Mission to Help the Hudaydah Agreement (UNMHA) in Yemen, which utilizes mapping and satellite engineering to boost ceasefire checking and boosts the UN’s potential to “understand, analyze and respond to crises that may well have a digital dimension, and…address electronic risks”.

Political support

Also, new technological innovation can guidance political procedures, especially in advertising and marketing inclusion.

“In a variety of peace negotiations, we have made use of synthetic intelligence (AI)-assisted electronic dialogues to access out to hundreds of interlocutors, to listen to their views and priorities,” she said.

“This has been a especially handy way to arrive at typically excluded teams, together with women”.

Security and safety

They can also make improvements to the security and protection of peacekeepers and civilian workers on the floor.

“The start of the Tactic for the Digital Transformation of Peacekeeping represents an important step in direction of this target, and towards far more powerful mandate implementation – escalating early warning capacities,” mentioned the political chief.

These instruments also support visualize information and express info-abundant examination to advise Security Council selections – as illustrated by a the latest virtual fact presentation on Colombia, highlighting the UN’s function on the floor for ambassadors.

Worrying trends

Nevertheless, there are areas of worry, Ms. DiCarlo continued, citing estimates that the range of countrywide and non-State-sponsored incidents of technology becoming employed maliciously, has nearly quadrupled given that 2015.

“Of precise concern is exercise concentrating on infrastructure that presents vital general public services, these types of as well being and humanitarian companies,” she explained.

At the exact same time, deadly autonomous weapons increase inquiries with regards to human accountability when force is utilised.

Echoing the Secretary-Typical, she called equipment with the ability and discretion to consider lives with no human involvement, “politically unacceptable, morally repugnant, and should be prohibited by international law”.

“Non-Point out actors are turning into progressively adept at using minimal-charge and broadly offered digital technologies to go after their agendas,” warned the UN official, highlighting that terrorist teams this sort of Al-Qaida are actively making use of social media platforms to recruit, program and fundraise.

Mounting challenges

From surveillance systems that can target communities or men and women, to possibly discriminatory AI, she drew consideration to the human legal rights implications of new tech.

“We are also anxious about the rising use of internet shutdowns, including in circumstances of energetic conflict, which deprive communities of their implies of communication, perform, and political participation,” reported Ms. DiCarlo, recalling Myanmar, in which these incidents have developed in range and length since the military coup very last yr.

Additionally, she ongoing, social media can gas polarization and violence by spreading disinformation, radicalization, racism, and misogyny – heightening tensions and exacerbating conflict.

“In Ethiopia, as the fighting escalated, there was an alarming increase in social media posts spreading inflammatory rhetoric, with some going as far as inciting ethnic violence,” the senior UN official reminded the Council. “We also know that disinformation can hinder the skill of our missions to carry out their mandates, by exacerbating falsehoods and fuelling polarization”.

Relocating ahead

When embracing the prospects that new technological innovation provides to progress peace, the hazards must be mitigated and responsible use promoted by all.

Driven by the Program of Action on Dislike Speech and interaction initiatives these as Confirmed, the UN is acting to allay these dangers by averting misperceptions and misunderstandings, Ms. DiCarlo explained to the assembly.

“However, extra have to be done,” she concluded, spotlighting the World wide Electronic Compact, which would outline shared principles for an “open, totally free and protected electronic potential for all” the New Agenda for Peace, which can take a holistic see of world security’ and the proposed Code of Perform for Integrity in General public Information.

Electronic rights

Briefing virtually, Nanjala Nyabola, Director of Advox, the Digital Legal rights Undertaking of the online local community, International Voices, highlighted the want for upholding and enforcing digital legal rights.

“In the past two decades we have witnessed a dramatic growth in the use of electronic engineering,” she reported, even so it has “sadly not been complimented by a equivalent investment decision in safeguarding ourselves from the harms that the enlargement has caused”.

The pace of technological progress has established problems that could have been prevented at an before stage, reported Ms. Nyabola, calling for a broad moratorium on new surveillance systems.

She turned the Council’s attention to digital obtain guidelines and net shutdowns, underscoring how they negatively effect cultural and financial minorities and pose hurdles to women’s obtain.

“Digital legal rights are human legal rights,” she reported, adding that buyers should be shielded.

Bettering peacekeeping

Dirk Druet, Adjunct Professor at McGill University’s Centre for Intercontinental Peace and Safety Reports, highlighted sophisticated checking and language-translation systems that can make improvements to peacekeeping usefulness and protection.

He urged the UN to choose a much more deliberate real truth-telling job in conflict zones and reminded that peacekeeping functions have to forge their have digital know-how protocols over and above individuals of the States they aid.

Finally, Mr. Druet preserved that for community constituencies, real truth-telling is specifically tied to believe in-building, advocating for an greater ability to keep an eye on and engage the “information landscape” in conflict zones.