1,721,054 research outputs found
Regulation of Health-Related Artificial Intelligence in Medical Devices: The Canadian Story
Get PDFArtificial Intelligence (AI) may transform Canadian healthcare. The hope is that AI will enable more accurate and efficient care, thereby solving many access, quality, and safety problems. Despite this tantalizing prospect, there are risks of unsafe AI harming patients, algorithmic bias, and threats to privacy. This work begins analysis of whether applicable laws are up to the task of ensuring Canadians can benefit from effective health-related AI while minimizing AI-related risks. It focuses on Health Canada’s regulation of medical devices, a ‘first line of defence’ that decides which devices are safe, effective, and thus permitted for trade in Canadian markets. After highlighting the regulatory challenge, we provide the first detailed explanation of Canadian medical device regulations and how they apply to AI-enabled devices. We then discuss a still-developing “alternative pathway” for licencing devices with AI and the regulatory gaps left open. We conclude with recommendations that a recent emphasis on post-market surveillance should not be at the expense of robust pre-market review and that safety and efficacy review embrace bias- and privacy-related risks. Further, while post-market surveillance holds potential for ensuring the safety of adaptive machine-learning medical devices over time, much will depend on regulatory capacity and competency and investments therein
Regulating the safety of health-related Artificial Intelligence
No full textThis article analyzes whether Canada’s present approach to regulating health-related artificial intelligence (AI) can address relevant safety-related challenges. Focusing primarily on Health Canada’s regulation of medical devices with AI, it examines whether the existing regulatory approach can adequately address general safety concerns as well as those related to algorithmic bias and challenges posed by the intersections of these concerns with privacy and security interests. It identifies several issues and proposes reforms that aim to ensure Canadians can access beneficial AI while keeping unsafe products off Canadian markets and motivating safe, effective use of AI products for appropriate purposes and populations
Putting Health To Rights: A Canadian View on Global Trends in Litigating Health Care Rights
Get PDFThe majority of the world’s constitutions now include mention of a right to health or health care. Will the courts be effective at championing the health rights of vulnerable populations? Courts recognize that health systems embody complex tradeoffs, and have struggled to draw a principled line of deference to government decision-making. Worldwide, one finds courts drawing this line in various ways, depending, among other things, on their country’s constitutional aspirations, the
maturity and internal accountability of its health system, and broader currents of social mobilization. For their part, Canadian courts have been very restrained, conceptualizing health rights largely in negative terms – overturning restrictions on access to abortion, medical marijuana, and so on – while refusing to recognize any positive duty on the part of government to provide particular health services. Could Canadian courts do more, without tumbling into overreach? The paper ends by sketching options for a more robust and progressive approach to adjudicating health rights claims.Peer reviewe
Putting health to rights: A Canadian view on global trends in litigating health care rights
Get PDFThe majority of the world’s constitutions now include mention of a right to health or health care. Will the courts be effective at championing the health rights of vulnerable populations? Courts recognize that health systems embody complex tradeoffs, and have struggled to draw a principled line of deference to government decision-making. Worldwide, one finds courts drawing this line in various ways, depending, among other things, on their country’s constitutional aspirations, the
maturity and internal accountability of its health system, and broader currents of social mobilization. For their part, Canadian courts have been very restrained, conceptualizing health rights largely in negative terms – overturning restrictions on access to abortion, medical marijuana, and so on – while refusing to recognize any positive duty on the part of government to provide particular health services. Could Canadian courts do more, without tumbling into overreach? The paper ends by sketching options for a more robust and progressive approach to adjudicating health rights claims.Peer reviewe
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Improving Patient Safety Through Nurse Collective Bargaining
No full textNursing workload and time worked are two key working conditions tied to the risk of adverse events and medical error. In Canada at the provincial level, these issues, which I call “patient safety issues”, are raised, negotiated and ultimately resolved within collective bargaining structures that are based on traditional “Wagnerist” labour law theory. I reviewed the results of decisions on patient safety issues within fifteen years of nurse collective bargaining in six of the thirteen provinces/territories. My findings are that patient safety issues of workload are inadequately addressed in nurse collective agreements, but at the same time these agreements contained strong patient safety-driven protections relating to time-worked issues of scheduling, hours of work and overtime. I further conclude that these limitations can be attributed to a series of trends in the process of nurse collective bargaining that tended to limit the ability of nurses’ unions to push for patient safety protections and more generally to marginalize patient safety issues in the bargaining process in favour of more traditional economic issues. To overcome these problems, I propose that patient safety issues in nursing be decided instead in locally-based “patient safety committees” instead of in the current traditional labour law model
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Fraud in Mexico's Government Procurement Sector
No full textThis thesis analyzes the problem of corruption in the Mexican government procurement system, aiming to provide a mix of legal and policy solutions to combat and prevent it. Comparing the policies and laws that make up the regulatory framework of public procurement in Canada and Mexico, this study seeks to extract the best practices that can improve the Mexican system. This text illuminates how the weaknesses within Mexico’s procurement system has provoked the current exploitation of alternative procurement methods (known as “adjudicación directa” and “invitación a cuando menos tres personas”) to embezzle public resources through fictitious contract awards. Although we have seen a tendency towards including requirements for “transparency” and “accountability” into Mexican procurement law, this on its own is insufficient to combat corruption. Consequently, I argue that procurement units have to enhance these transparency policies by disclosing the rationale behind every procurement and contract award prior to the disbursement of the resources; having competition as the maximum principle to fulfill while doing so. This will allow auditing bodies (and Mexican citizens) to scrutinize the rationale behind these disbursements. The Public Function Secretary could oversee this process to validate the legality and the social benefit justifications claimed by the procurement units prior to utilizing alternative procurement methods
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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