Glenn Cohen

...On the surface, traveling for a medical procedure may not seem appealing, but people typically do it for outpatient procedures with quick recoveries and wrap a vacation around it, says MTA President Renee-Marie Stephano. Getting credible information on outcomes from overseas procedures can be difficult. A search of the PubMed medical database yields numerous case reports of complications from operations like weight-loss surgery and cosmetic procedures outside the patients’ home country, but many of these cases are from Europe and Australia. There’s no information available about complication rates. “As with everything in this industry, getting actual data is quite difficult,” says Harvard professor Glenn Cohen, author of the 2014 book Patients with Passports.

Last Tuesday, Amazon, JP Morgan, and Berkshire Hathaway announced that they were coming together to do…something related to healthcare for their 1.2 million employees and could possibly expand to the public...Despite the fact that we have next to zero information about what AmazonCare would actually be, the news still sent healthcare stocks falling and led to optimistic predictions and double-takes from doubters...If Amazon had that authorization, it would be able to use people’s health information to nudge them toward specific products, says I. Glenn Cohen, a Harvard Law School professor who specializes in health law policy and editor of the forthcoming book Big Data, Health Law, and Bioethics.

Artificial intelligence is taking the healthcare industry by storm as researchers share breakthrough after breakthrough and vendors quickly commercialize advanced algorithms offering clinical decision support or financial and operational aid...Establishing a high level of trust in the data used to fuel machine learning tools will be essential for ensuring that the resulting care quality is high and patients are receiving the help they need to manage chronic conditions or acute illnesses. “We are increasingly using very complicated algorithms and cutting edge artificial intelligence to predict and guide health care, such as recommending a certain dose of insulin to a diabetic patient,” says I. Glenn Cohen, Faculty Director at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School.

Precision medicine and artificial intelligence (AI) are complicated by design: Both scientific fields rely on extreme specificity, complex equations, and forces that can’t be seen. As both fields begin to alter the healthcare landscape, they could plant a number of legal landmines. Can algorithms or biomarkers be patented? Will centers be able to access the large data sets they need to perform accurate AI? What control over their data should patients have? And how will practice be affected by differing legal frameworks in the US and Europe? A new collaborative initiative between Harvard Law School and the University of Copenhagen plans to explore those issues. Recently announced by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard and the Center for Advanced Studies in Biomedical Innovation Law (CeBIL) at Copenhagen, the effort will be called the Project on Precision Medicine, Artificial Intelligence, and the Law (PMAIL). It will be led by Harvard Law School professor I. Glenn Cohen.

It’s not easy to feel good watching the NFL. CTE may or may not be destroying players’ lives as they play their hearts out for the fans...Is it ethical to watch the Super Bowl at all?...[Glenn Cohen]: Yes. But while watching fans should consider what they can do to help protect and promote the health of NFL players. As you know, my team released a major 493 page report that received national coverage “Protecting and Promoting the Health of NFL Players: Legal and Ethical Analysis and Recommendations.” In that report we consider the ethical role of 20 separate stakeholders in promoting and protecting NFL player health and make.

Amazon.com on Tuesday announced a joint partnership with Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan to create an independent health care company for their employees, putting an end to months of speculation that the technology giant was eyeing a foray into the medical industry...“Amazon already has huge amounts of our data — we give it to them in exchange for two-day shipping,” said I. Glenn Cohen, a Harvard Law School professor who specializes in health law policy. “But what happens when you add in actual health care data? Many people are already concerned about who has access to that information, and this exacerbates those concerns.”

What happens when the parents who created frozen embryos go to war with each other over whether to procreate with them or destroy them? That's the battle now being waged before the Colorado Supreme Court by the now-divorced Mandy and Drake Rooks...The Rooks case is different because it frames the dispute in constitutional terms: Does the right to procreate trump the right not to? "For the first time," says Harvard law Professor Glenn Cohen, there’s a chance "we’ll actually get a ruling about what the US constitution means or doesn’t mean in this context."

During three emotional days of divorce talks, Drake and Mandy Rooks managed to agree on how to divide up almost every aspect of their old lives down to the last piece of furniture. Only one thing remained: the frozen embryos...“Constitution questions are front and center in a way that they have not been in the other cases,” said Harvard law professor I. Glenn Cohen. And if the judges decide the Rookses’ dispute on such grounds, that would allow it to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court — where a ruling would apply nationwide. Cohen said the central issue focuses on how to balance one person’s constitutional right to procreate with another’s countervailing constitutional right to not procreate.

...Medical tourism thus presents both opportunities and risks. At its best, the industry can help India grow its health care system, using the revenues generated from international patients to improve local care. At its worst, it risks shifting resources to private hospitals catering to elites at the expense of public institutions serving the poor. “What’s the effect on health care for Indians? Here, the answer is the story is kind of messy,” says Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School and an expert on medical tourism. “But there’s some reason to be concerned.”

In an era when too many people remain suspicious of vaccines, one of the world’s largest manufacturers may have made matters worse while trying to control dengue fever. For the past two weeks, Sanofi has been engulfed by scandal in the Philippines after disclosing that its Dengvaxia vaccine could worsen — rather than prevent — future cases of the mosquito-borne virus in people who had not previously been infected. About 830,000 children in the Philippines were vaccinated; now the government is demanding a $59 million refund and probing whether the vaccine was approved improperly...And to restore confidence in vaccines, a reckoning is required. “At a time when convincing people to be vaccinated has encountered increasing resistance, it’s really unfortunate to have this story emerge,” said Glenn Cohen, a Harvard Law School professor who is an expert in health law and bioethics. “The company owes a full accounting of what it knew and when.”

An op-ed by Carmel Shachar and Glenn Cohen. 2017 was a year of tremendous uncertainty for many areas of public policy. Health care policy was no exception, most prominently with an almost successful push by Congressional Republicans to radically revise the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Medical research and bioethics also faced uncertainty, with the struggle to ethically engage with new technologies and to better understand the boundaries around self-determination. As we look over the past year and anticipate the coming one, the overarching question remains: Is it possible to run a health law and health care system given this level of flux?

An interview with Glenn Cohen. The first so-called digital pill has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. It’s a version of the antipsychotic drug Abilify and contains a tiny sensor that will send a signal to a patch the user is wearing. Advocates say the digital version will keep patients from forgetting to take their medicine. Others are concerned about potential Big Brother components related to ingesting something that could transmit information externally.

For the first time, the Food and Drug Administration has approved a digital pill — a medication embedded with a sensor that can tell doctors whether, and when, patients take their medicine. The approval, announced late on Monday, marks a significant advance in the growing field of digital devices designed to monitor medicine-taking and to address the expensive, longstanding problem that millions of patients do not take drugs as prescribed...Seeking to address concerns about privacy and coercion, Otsuka officials contracted with several bioethicists. Among them, I. Glenn Cohen, a Harvard law professor, said safeguards adopted include allowing patients to instantly stop physicians and others from seeing some or all of their data.

Harvard Law School is expanding its advising and mentoring programs four months after a school task force studying diversity and inclusion released a report calling for more advising opportunities on campus...John F. Manning ’82, the school’s recently appointed dean, said the Law School changed its policies to foster more organic and effective advising relationships between students and faculty. "The value added by mentoring and advising is not evenly distributed across the population and the propensity to seek mentoring and advising is not evenly distributed across the population,” Manning said...I. Glenn Cohen, a Law School professor who leads student reading groups, said he thinks the new advising program will help connect students with mentors and advisers more likely to share their specific interests and are more capable of answering their questions. “The reading group topics are connected to areas the students may be interested in, and by having the reading group instructors serve and be advisors for the students, we’d be more likely to get a match between what a particular student’s interest is and what the faculty member’s expertise is,” Cohen said...Marcia Sells, the Law School’s Dean of Students, said the school also instituted a program for students to take faculty out to dinner with all expenses paid by the school, similar to the College’s Classroom-to-Table program. In addition, administrators created a new peer advising program, she said. “We said to [the peer advisors], ‘You are a resource to them, plan a time to meet with them and talk—they didn’t have to take them out to lunch—but just to be there as a sounding board,’” Sells said...Sadie Hillier [`20], a first-year student at the Law School, wrote in an email that she thinks the new faculty advising program is very helpful. She wrote that she thinks she got “lucky” with her reading group and advisor, Law School professor Michael J. Klarman. “I've been provided with an abundance of mentorship opportunities in the last couple of months, and I have seized onto every single one,” Hillier said...Still, David Sackstein ’14 [`20], another first-year student who said he was in Cohen’s reading group, said that he fears some people may not get the resources they need despite the new programs. “There’s always, always, always going to be students who slip through the cracks,” Sackstein said.

An article by Glenn Cohen, Sharona Hoffman, and Eli Y. Adashi. The mugger's demand “Your money or your life” is a familiar one. However, in an era of vast hospital computer networks and electronic health records, a novel risk to worry about is, “Your money or your patient's life.” This threat, known as “ransomware,” is an increasingly common experience for computer users around the world. The relevance of this hazard to health care became widely apparent on 12 May 2017 after a global attack effected by ransomware named WannaCry. Among those most severely affected were hospitals, pharmacies, and clinics of the British National Health Service.

An op-ed by Glenn Cohen. There’s a scientific development on the horizon that could upend the abortion debate: artificial wombs. The research remains preliminary, but in April a group of scientists at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia announced amazing advances in artificial womb technologies. The authors explained how they had successfully sustained significantly premature lambs for four weeks in an artificial womb they had designed. This enabled the lambs to develop in a way very similar to lambs that had developed in their mothers’ wombs. Indeed, the oldest lamb — more than a year old at the time the paper was published — appeared to be completely normal.

In April, scientists achieved a major breakthrough that could one day drastically improve the fate of babies born extremely prematurely. Eight premature baby lambs spent their last month of development in an external womb that resembled a high-tech ziplock bag. At the time, the oldest lamb was nearly a year old, and still seemed to be developing normally. This technology, if it works in humans, could one day prove lifesaving for the 30,000 or so babies each year that are born earlier than 26 weeks into pregnancy. It could also complicate—and even jeopardize—the right to an abortion in an America in which that right is predicated on whether a fetus is “viable.” “The Supreme Court has pegged the constitutional treatment of abortion to the viability of a fetus,” I. Glenn Cohen, a Harvard Law School bioethicist, told Gizmodo.