Streamlining review of research involving humans: Canadian models

Pandemics, privacy, and public health research

Sharing data expediently for pandemic response purposes exposes healthcare providers in Canada to significant regulatory uncertainty. Duplicative and contradictory ethical and legal duties flowing from overlapping sources can stifle flows of medical data among clinicians, researchers, and institutions. Authorities should support caregivers and accelerate research by providing clear guidance to the health sector. Institutions should foster robust data stewardship and standardize their practices to those recognized among the international health informatics community. Reform is critical to ensuring Canadian healthcare providers can deliver efficient health responses that are integrated with dispersed and disparate national and international approaches.

Big Data's Role in Precision Public Health

Precision public health is an emerging practice to more granularly predict and understand public health risks and customize treatments for more specific and homogeneous subpopulations, often using new data, technologies, and methods. Big data is one element that has consistently helped to achieve these goals, through its ability to deliver to practitioners a volume and variety of structured or unstructured data not previously possible. Big data has enabled more widespread and specific research and trials of stratifying and segmenting populations at risk for a variety of health problems. Examples of success using big data are surveyed in surveillance and signal detection, predicting future risk, targeted interventions, and understanding disease. Using novel big data or big data approaches has risks that remain to be resolved. The continued growth in volume and variety of available data, decreased costs of data capture, and emerging computational methods mean big data success will likely be a required pillar of precision public health into the future. This review article aims to identify the precision public health use cases where big data has added value, identify classes of value that big data may bring, and outline the risks inherent in using big data in precision public health efforts.

The ethics weathervane

BACKGROUND

Global collaboration in genomic research is increasingly both a scientific reality and an ethical imperative. This past decade has witnessed the emergence of six new, interconnected areas of ethical consensus and emphasis for policy in genomics: governance, security, empowerment, transparency, the right not to know, and globalization.

DISCUSSION

The globalization of genomic research warrants an approach to governance policies grounded in human rights. A human rights approach activates the ethical principles underpinning genomic research. It lends force to the right of all citizens to benefit from scientific progress, and to the right of all scientists to be recognized for their contributions.