| | | | |  | | By Carmen Paun, Erin Schumaker, Daniel Payne and Ruth Reader | | | | | | |  Researchers used a smartphone app to see if how we look provides insight into how we feel. | Getty Images | A smartphone app under development at Dartmouth College uses image processing and artificial intelligence to detect when a user might be sliding into depression — even before the person knows it. Andrew Campbell, a Dartmouth professor of computer science, became interested in what smartphones reveal about human behavior when the first devices came on the market more than a decade ago. Shortly after, his brother died by suicide after being diagnosed with bipolar disorder at age 19. “That really completely changed my research direction,” he told Carmen. Campbell started focusing on the mental health of college students because signs of mental illness are most likely to appear around that age, he said. How it works: Campbell and his colleagues recruited 177 people to respond to questions about feeling down, depressed or hopeless who agreed to let the app sporadically capture images of them while they answered. The users, primarily white women, didn’t know when the app would snap photos. The researchers trained the app, called MoodCapture, to correlate self-reports of feeling depressed with facial expressions such as gaze, eye movement, head position and muscle rigidity, as well as ambient elements like dominant colors, lighting, photo location and the number of people in the picture. If someone consistently appeared with a flat expression in a dimly lit room for an extended period, the artificial intelligence model might infer that the user was experiencing the onset of depression, according to the researchers. MoodCapture correctly identified early symptoms of depression with 75 percent accuracy, the researchers said. They will present their results at the Association of Computing Machinery conference in Hawaii in May. What’s next? Campbell sees the app as a low-cost intervention that could nudge people to seek help in the early days of depression without burdening the user or making them feel guilty about feeling down.
| | | | A message from Kidney Care Access: Dialysis patients and their families are being harmed. Employer group health plans can discriminate against patients with kidney failure, disrupting coverage for the patient and their family. A new bipartisan bill will restore essential protections as Congress intended – for these patients and their families. Congress: pass H.R. 6860, the bipartisan Restore Protections for Dialysis Patients Act. Protect patients and their families. Learn more. | | | | | | | 
Mill Run, Pa. | Shawn Zeller/POLITICO | This is where we explore the ideas and innovators shaping health care. A German man who received 217 Covid shots over 29 months saw no ill effects and seems never to have caught the disease, according to a study published in The Lancet by researchers from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Share any thoughts, news, tips and feedback with Carmen Paun at cpaun@politico.com, Daniel Payne at dpayne@politico.com, Ruth Reader at rreader@politico.com or Erin Schumaker at eschumaker@politico.com. Send tips securely through SecureDrop, Signal, Telegram or WhatsApp.
| | | | A message from Kidney Care Access:   | | | | | | | 
Rounds sees Medicare and Medicaid as potential AI innovation funders. | Getty Images | Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), who’s on the Senate’s bipartisan artificial intelligence working group, thinks Medicare and Medicaid could potentially fund AI innovation in health care. Rounds suggested it might be part of a plan the working group presents to fellow senators later this month, POLITICO’s Mohar Chatterjee reports. “If you’re looking at how health care works, the Finance Committee might very well be an area where they're going to take a look at different approaches about how you pay for these innovations and so forth through Medicare and Medicaid,” Rounds said at an Axios event in Washington. The Senate Finance Committee oversees Medicare and Medicaid. Why it matters: Rounds’ proposal for funding AI innovation in health care through federal health insurance programs is one of the first ideas for legislation to emerge from the AI Insight Forums held in the Senate last year. The meetings were organized by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in partnership with Rounds and Sens. Todd Young (R-Ind.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), the working group also known as the Gang of Four. What’s next? Rounds said he spoke with lawmakers on the Finance Committee last week and that Schumer and Heinrich plan to do the same. Rounds also highlighted privacy protections for user data as a prerequisite for rolling out any legislation pertaining to AI in health care.
| | | | A message from Kidney Care Access: A recent Supreme Court ruling now allows employer group health plans to discriminate against patients with kidney failure and disrupt coverage for the entire family – spouse and kids.
The Bipartisan Restore Protections for Dialysis Patients Act reverses the negative, unintended consequences of the Supreme Court’s ruling by simply restoring long-standing protections put in place by Congress for patients and their families.
Congress: restore what’s right. Pass H.R. 6860, the Bipartisan Restore Protections for Dialysis Patients Act. Learn more. | | | | | | | JOIN US ON 3/21 FOR A TALK ON FINANCIAL LITERACY: Americans from all communities should be able to save, build wealth, and escape generational poverty, but doing so requires financial literacy. How can government and industry ensure access to digital financial tools to help all Americans achieve this? Join POLITICO on March 21 as we explore how Congress, regulators, financial institutions and nonprofits are working to improve financial literacy education for all. REGISTER HERE. | | | | | | | | | 
DOJ's got its eyes on private equity investment in health care. | J. David Ake/AP | Three federal agencies have joined forces to probe private equity’s increasing control of health care. On Tuesday, the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Health and Human Services jointly issued a request for information and public comment on: — Health care deals by health systems, private payers, private equity funds and other alternative asset managers — Information on transactions that wouldn’t be reported under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act, which requires reporting large transactions to the Justice Department and the FTC for antitrust review Why it matters: The agencies announced their request for information in tandem with a workshop the agencies hosted on private equity's impact on health care. The move suggests that private equity and corporate participation in health care might be an antitrust focus for the agencies this year. “When private equity firms buy out health care facilities only to slash staffing and cut quality, patients lose out,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a statement. “Through this inquiry, the FTC will continue scrutinizing private equity roll-ups, strip-and-flip tactics and other financial plays that can enrich executives but leave the American public worse off.” A group that lobbies for private equity firms, the American Investment Council, wrote to Khan on Monday to accuse her of bias and make the case that private equity ownership is good for health care. What’s next? The public has 60 days to respond to the agencies’ request for comment.
| | | | DON’T MISS POLITICO’S HEALTH CARE SUMMIT: The stakes are high as America's health care community strives to meet the evolving needs of patients and practitioners, adopt new technologies and navigate skeptical public attitudes toward science. Join POLITICO’s annual Health Care Summit on March 13 where we will discuss the future of medicine, including the latest in health tech, new drugs and brain treatments, diagnostics, health equity, workforce strains and more. REGISTER HERE. | | | | | | | | | Follow us on Twitter | | | | Follow us | | | | |
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