RFK Jr pushes US health data pooling as screen-time review links devices to child outcomes

Kennedy, who heads the US Department of Health and Human Services, said the data should be connected and shared with government and independent researchers. "We need to use America's health data to determine whether the food we eat, the chemicals we encounter, the vaccines that we're administering, the other environmental and lifestyle exposures are contributing in one way or another to the chronic disease epidemic," he said, per The Guardian.

The Guardian reported that about two dozen people watched the live stream of the event with the Maha Institute, which is headed by Mark Gorton. The Guardian also said the institute was co-founded by Tony Lyons, whose publishing house gave $4m to Kennedy through various Maha foundations, citing New York Times reporting.

What the plan covers

Kennedy pointed to Medicaid and Medicare as the main pools. "Medicaid is a really useful vehicle for studying that because there are hundreds of millions of lives in there, including tens of millions of children who've been in that program for 10 or 20 years," he said. He added that FDA monitoring systems can link claims data and electronic health records "to conduct active safety surveillance", and named the commercial platform HealthVerity as another way to link insurance claims, prescriptions, laboratory results and electronic health records.

State-level datasets reported to the CDC, he said, were "unusable" 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." Wider access, in his account, 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".

He also said federal officials are using AI to process the data. "Studies that used to take years, you can do them literally in s..." the Guardian transcript reads, cut off at that point. Wearable and connected-device data sit inside that wider picture: the same week, trade body CTIA launched a resource on wireless-powered wearables and health, Yahoo Finance reported on 29 September, while Mobile World Live ran a feature on Huawei's connected-health ambitions the same day.

Screen time and children

Separately, a review published this week found greater screen time is associated with poorer outcomes for children in thinking, learning, speech, behaviour and emotional regulation, CNN reported on 30 September. Senior author Sheri Madigan, a professor of psychology at the University of Calgary, told CNN the work covered nearly three million children aged 18 and under from 64 countries.

"Most of the associations were relatively small, like most other predictors of child development, but small does not mean meaningless, particularly when we're talking about an exposure like screen time, which is nearly universal in children's lives," she said. Madigan added that newer studies showed stronger associations than older ones, possibly because devices have changed: "Twenty years ago, a child might have spent an hour watching a television program. Today, devices are everywhere, carried in our hands, and they are also interactive, engaging, and responsive to the individual."

She cautioned against reading the findings as proof of harm. "Because our findings are correlational, they don't prove that screens cause these developmental outcomes," she told CNN, adding that parents should look at where screens crowd out sleep, physical activity, human connection, learning and play. She also said governments should treat children's screen use like other factors tied to child well-being, through guidance, education, research and online safeguards.

The commercial layer underneath

The push to gather health data rests on infrastructure that keeps expanding. Digital Realty announced on 22 September that it plans a cable landing station inside its LAX12 data centre in El Segundo, California, in partnership with Assured Communications, Data Center Knowledge reported on 30 September. The station targets Asia-Pacific to North America routes and is expected to begin supporting cables in 2028.

"Digital Realty sees cable landing infrastructure as an increasingly important part of the broader connectivity ecosystem," Craig Waldrop, the company's vice president of strategy and business development, told Data Center Knowledge. He said LAX12 is the company's first turnkey cable landing solution. AI is a major driver of bandwidth demand, the report notes, though not the only one.

On the device side, the Environmental Justice Foundation published a report summary on 30 September analysing PlastChem data on plastic-associated chemicals in everyday items including food packaging, clothing, infant feeding bottles and children's toys. The summary argues the findings make the case for products that are "safe by design" and says that today they are not.

Meanwhile, a study released on Wednesday by Len Sherman, an executive in residence at Columbia Business School, found Uber wait times after driver match grew 19% between the first quarter of 2023 and the same period this year, while price per mile rose 53% on average, Business Insider reported on 30 September. Sherman examined 37,500 trips in six US cities using GigU data; wait times rose in five of the six, including Atlanta, Dallas and Houston, and dipped slightly in Tampa. An Uber spokesperson told Business Insider the analysis "relies on a number of inaccuracies, which we've publicly refuted", and declined to comment on the specific wait-time and per-mile figures.

None of these threads is joined up yet. Kennedy's remarks describe an ambition, not a finished system: the Guardian account includes no budget, no timeline and no published rulemaking. The screen-time review is correlational. The cable station is not due to support cables until 2028. What the week does show is how much of the debate now depends on data that has not yet been collected, linked or audited.