Search giant enters the healthcare business; The scientific ontology of sentiment; Combining RSS and Slack

Alphabet enters the healthcare field

Google's parent company, Alphabet, recently announced that they were entering the healthcare business.  Wonder what took them so long.  Alphabet, as everyone knows, is in the business of building a database of people.  They already know what people search for, where they go during their travels, what apps that have installed on their phone, what websites they visit, etc.  But knowing details about their health would be a treasure trove.  Of course, they wouldn't be able to get identifying information about an individual, as this would violate HIPAA, unless there was consent given somehow.  (Hmm, when was the last time you **really** read the end-used agreement?)  But they might obtain interesting information about healthcare trends, and provider prescribing patterns.  They might get involved in Clinical Decision Support, and maybe guide/influence healthcare practices.  Might their efforts lead to software that might help the user-physician to make clinical decisions?  

The scientific ontology of sentiment

Speaking of Google, one blogger describes the lack of the "scientific ontology of sentiment" in academic papers.  If I understand him correctly, he laments not being able to determine quickly whether or not an academic paper agrees with or disagrees with another journal article.  You have to read the article first, and make that determination manually.  He mentions Google Scholar as being helpful in not only the displaying references of a journal entry, but also other papers that reference that paper.  Something that the old Science Citation Index used to do, which was very helpful.  But annotating each journal entry or paper with additional information, such as a rank as to its clinical importance, from minor observations to practice-changing results, might be helpful for a system trying to determine in real-time whether or not to retrieve the article and display as high-priority to a busy physician, who can read only so much with limited time.

Will RSS find new life with Slack?

My Heme-Onc.news site works on a system similar to RSS.  This system was all the rage around 2007, and is now used here and there, by dedicated users.  Google dropping its Reader app led to a significant decline in the use of this technology.  A recent blog posting suggested that RSS might find resurgence by using a feature of Slack, namely the Alerts channel.  This would trigger an alert if there were updates to an RSS feed.  This could be helpful if there was a feed that sent out notifications of a report of high-priority and importance (see above), but not if one was updated with every single change event.  That would get annoying quickly.  Still, it's an innovative way of combining two technologies, which might be refined and made useful in some other invocation.  I would not want to install Slack or get an account on Slack solely for the purpose of getting notifications.  Not at this time, when there is no RSS feed to take advantage of it.  Same reason for not utilizing the WebSub protocol.  Journal publishers have not embraced this protocol, choosing instead to email subscribers an excerpt of their table of contents of the month.