January 2, 2019 | It’s been a big year for the clinical trials and the healthcare industry. Developments in real world data, blockchain technology, and AI have led to a fantastic year of groundbreaking announcements and thoughtful discussions. As we head into 2019, we at Clinical Informatics News would like to take a moment and reflect on the achievements from this past year. In that spirit, here are the top 10 stories of 2018, ranked in order of popularity.

--The Editors

1. Uber Launches Uber Health, Looks To Improve Patient Experience In Clinical Research

Uber is looking to expand their outreach to the clinical research community with the launch of Uber Health, a new dashboard the company hopes will remove transportation as a barrier to proper care. Read more

2. What GlaxoSmithKline Learned From Their Digital Trial of Rheumatoid Arthritis

Patients say they would rather participate in a mobile or digital clinical trial than a more traditional site-based trial, but getting a mobile trial to work has proven more complicated. Michelle Crouthamel of GlaxoSmithKline shares what she’s learning about apps, retention, and whatever happened with the company’s PARADE study. Read more

3. Real-World Blockchain Applications In Healthcare

As blockchain visionaries see it, value chains of the future will have an entirely new infrastructure and change the nature of transactions involving “assets”—ranging from claims funneling into a revenue cycle to patients moving through an episode of care—by removing the need for an intermediary that sets the rules and extracts a fee. Read more

4. Coming To The Tipping Point Of eConsent

More than a decade after being introduced to the technology, clinical trial sponsors and study coordinators are still looking for ways to implement eConsent into their process of recruitment and management. Read more

5. Blockchain-Secured, Patient-Controlled Health Records

Physicians are particularly enthusiastic about blockchain’s potential to restore their clinical autonomy and relationship with patients by cutting out unnecessary middlemen. In the case of electronic health records (EHRs), the disintermediated parties would include hospitals and EHR vendors by shifting ownership to individual patients. It is arguably the most valuable use case for blockchain, and certainly the most popular. Read more

6. The Role Of Blockchain In Healthcare

Affordable healthcare requires a better way for providers, patients, and payers to exchange information, and, according to a presentation at the recent Health:Further festival in Nashville, Tennessee, blockchain could be the means. Read more

7. Should AI Be Priority In Healthcare?

At a JP Morgan panel, what started as a discussion on the promise and future of artificial intelligence shifted to more fundamental discussions of drivers of health care. Read more

8. Precision Communication For Precision Medicine: How NIH’s All Of Us Is Tackling Patient Recruitment

In May, the National Institutes of Health launched national open enrollment for their All of Us Research Program. Now, the precision medicine is looking to make a difference in their approach to outreach. Read more

9. Avoid Unintentional Unblinding In Clinical Trials

Based on the ICH Guideline on Statistical Principles for Clinical Trials (E9), the most important design techniques for avoiding bias in clinical trials are blinding and randomization. Read more 

10. New England Journal Of Medicine Article Weighs The Risks Of DTC Genetic Testing

Recent events have many experts voicing their concerns about the potential misuse of direct-to-consumer genetic testing. Read more