Kennedy pushes linked US health records and AI analysis at Maha Institute event

Kennedy is the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services and a longtime vaccine skeptic. He said the aim was to work out whether food, chemicals, vaccines and other exposures are feeding what he calls a chronic disease epidemic. The Guardian reported his remarks on 30 September, from an event held with the Maha Institute on Monday. About two dozen people watched the live stream.

The Maha Institute is headed by Mark Gorton. Two weeks earlier, he described himself as "the boldest anti-vaxxer in the anti-vax conference", the Guardian reported. Tony Lyons co-founded the institute. His publishing house gave $4m to Kennedy through various Maha foundations, funded by political contributions and health-related corporations, according to New York Times reporting cited by the Guardian.

What Kennedy wants linked

Kennedy has been pulling together data from agencies he oversees, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. "Your health information should follow you wherever you go," he said. He pointed to apps for portable health records that make it easier for individuals to reach their own records, and also open them to government and outside use.

Medicaid, he argued, is a useful vehicle because it holds hundreds of millions of lives, including tens of millions of children enrolled for 10 or 20 years. The Trump administration is now tracking exposures, interventions and claim data in Medicaid, he said, while Medicare supplies information on older Americans and people with disabilities. FDA monitoring systems can link claims data and electronic health records "to conduct active safety surveillance". Commercial platforms such as HealthVerity can connect insurance claims, prescriptions, laboratory results and electronic health records.

State-level datasets reported to the CDC were "unusable" in his description, because they often collect different data points. "Too many of those systems remain siloed and cannot give us the real-time information we need to understand health at scale," Kennedy said. Wider access, he suggested, could connect immunization records, clinical data, laboratory results, pharmacy information and insurance claims "to create a more complete picture of a patient's health over a long period of time".

AI speed, and an autism registry

Federal officials are using AI to process the data, he said. "Studies that used to take years, you can do them literally in seconds. You can ask questions and you can get immediate answers, and that's what we're doing today." He also said AI "can help researchers find patterns across millions of health histories that human beings could never find by reading those records one at a time".

Kennedy said OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman met him this week and told him HHS uses generative AI, which Kennedy called "superintelligence", more than any other federal agency. He added that officials have created an autism registry despite widespread protest, and that the administration has launched studies on diet, electromagnetic fields, screen time and vaccines in the development of illness.

At the CDC, officials are using the Vaccine Safety Datalink to compare healthcare outcomes in vaccinated and unvaccinated people. They are also examining aluminum adjuvants in vaccines, the timing of the hepatitis B vaccine in infancy, live versus attenuated vaccines, and influenza, Covid and HPV vaccines in children, Kennedy said. Using Medicaid and linked real-world data, officials are studying vaccination during pregnancy as well, according to the Guardian's account.

Separate studies land the same week

The same week brought unrelated research on screens and children. CNN reported on 30 September that a review covering nearly three million children aged 18 and under in 64 countries found greater screen time was associated with poorer outcomes in thinking, learning, speech, behaviour and emotional regulation. Senior author Sheri Madigan, a psychology professor at the University of Calgary, told CNN the associations were "relatively small", but that "small does not mean meaningless" for an exposure that is nearly universal.

"We found that overall, greater screen time was associated with poorer outcomes for children across several areas of development, including how they think, learn, speak, behave, and regulate emotions."

Madigan said newer studies showed stronger associations than older ones, possibly because devices are now interactive and carried everywhere. She warned the findings are correlational and do not prove screens cause the outcomes. Tatiana Iniguez Berrozpe of the University of Zaragoza, who was not involved, called the paper methodologically sound and said the association is very small, in comments released via the Science Media Centre. Esther van Sluijs of Loughborough University said it was high quality but could not draw conclusions about specific screen uses such as social media or gaming.

Elsewhere, Business Insider reported on 30 September that an analysis by Len Sherman of Columbia Business School found Uber wait times rose 19% between the first quarter of 2023 and the same period this year, while price per mile rose 53%. Sherman examined 37,500 trips by drivers in six US cities using data from the app GigU. Uber said the analysis "relies on a number of inaccuracies, which we've publicly refuted".

On the environment side, the Environmental Justice Foundation published a summary of its Poison Plastics report on 30 September, drawing on PlastChem data to argue that everyday plastic products are not safe by design. And a listing on SideProjectors dated 30 September offered Studlark, an AI study SaaS with study rooms and messaging, for $2,999. Neither bears directly on Kennedy's data plan, but both show the wider argument about exposures and technology that his remarks sit inside.