The Lifeboat News
[ Message Archive | The Lifeboat News ]

    One of the Lancet co-authors is the chief executive of Surgisphere Archived Message

    Posted by walter on June 5, 2020, 1:48 am, in reply to "Lancet HCQ study is pulled"

    One of the co-authors, Sapan Desai, is the chief executive of Surgisphere.

    This seems a big surprise to me. Many medics queried how Surgisphere could have obtained this much hospital data in the time frame, and processed and analysed it, let alone deal with the huge data confidentiality issues in each country.
    Would being seen to have this data power not have opened fantastic doors for Surgisphere? The possibilities would be endless. Yet no conflict of interest was declared, as far as I can see.

    And were the Lancet not aware of this connection?

    The retraction statement is not signed by the above author with the key interest in the data provider, Dr Desai. This may be because the key explanation offered is this (my emphasis):

    "Our independent peer reviewers informed us that Surgisphere would not transfer the full dataset, client contracts, and the full ISO audit report to their servers for analysis as such transfer would violate client agreements and confidentiality requirements. As such, our reviewers were not able to conduct an independent and private peer review and therefore notified us of their withdrawal from the peer-review process."
    https://marlin-prod.literatumonline.com/pb-assets/Lancet/pdfs/S0140673620313246.pdf

    This refusal to pass on the data, could be legit - but makes the study's peer review protocols look incompetent. I can't help thinking that other reasons for not revealing the source data could be more compelling!

    A more detailed focus on Surgisphere was given in the (sorry, not-dumped-yet) Guardian, whose Australian counterpart seemed, with a single, simple enquiry to spark off the cascade of provenance questions that quickly enveloped the authors and the Lancet:

    Surgisphere: governments and WHO changed Covid-19 policy based on suspect data from tiny US company
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/covid-19-surgisphere-who-world-health-organization-hydroxychloroquine?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other#maincontent

    Note that it's a US company, ie from the land of competing rival Remdesivir. (No - don't note that!)

    Further questions led to the Australian hospitals denying involvement in the database, with at least one doctor who would have to have provided data saying he had never heard of Surgisphere at all. This all put the spotlight on Surgisphere, who was unable to give reassuring answers:

    "When contacted by the Guardian, Desai said his company employed just 11 people. The employees listed on LinkedIn were recorded on the site as having joined Surgisphere only two months ago. Several did not appear to have a scientific or statistical background, but mention expertise in strategy, copywriting, leadership and acquisition."

    Never before has it seemed more interesting to know who did what in a study

    Desai told the Guardian: “Surgisphere has been in business since 2008. Our healthcare data analytics services started about the same time and have continued to grow since that time. We use a great deal of artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate this process as much as possible, which is the only way a task like this is even possible.”

    No wonder the data seemed to come out of a black box; it did. If the Lancet study data is the result of processing by code from AI and machine learning algorithms this suggests there could be impenetrable barriers to its reproduction in a reasonable timescale; and further, are the AI and machine learning not then part of the data analysis? Is that legitimate?

    If Surgisphere didn't do all the data acquisition, who did?

    Desai again (my emphasis):

    " Surgisphere serves as a data aggregator and performs data analysis on this data,” he said. “We are not responsible for the source data, thus the labor intensive task required for exporting the data from an Electronic Health Records, converting it into the format required by our data dictionary, and fully deidentifying the data is done by the healthcare partner.”"

    Questions, questions
    Did they just buy the data then?
    One healthcare partner for six continents?
    Who are they - should they be secret? (OK maybe they aren't)
    Was it all a fiddle?

    Guess we'll need to wait and see.

    Message Thread: