Surgisphere is the company that provided the data to two major COVID-19 papers, that were later retracted.
The most shocking of the two retractions was of a paper that appeared to show that patients taking chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 were at a greater risk of death. On the basis of this paper, the World Health Organization stopped ongoing clinical trials. As the retraction and the Wikipedia page describe, many scientists quickly found aspects of the reported data that were implausible. Surgisphere would not release the data for an independent audit, so the authors not employed by Surgisphere retracted the paper.
One of the problems with the Surgisphere data was that it was difficult to see how a company that appeared to have less than 12 employees, could possibly have gained access to clinical data from a significant proportion of hospitals across the world. Even if they had got such access, how had they dealt with the huge problems the rest of us have with low quality and coding mismatch that are typical of digital data in healthcare, even from sophisticated hospitals?
The answer, of course, was “advanced machine learning” and “artificial intelligence”, for which the company had apparently won an award from a company called Frost and Sullivan:
[Surgisphere’s] QuartzClinical cloud-based healthcare data analytics platform was awarded the 2019 Frost and Sullivan Best Practices Award. Earning first place in the Machine Learning-Powered Data Analytics category, QuartzClinical was recognized for its innovative use of big data, advanced machine learning, and proven real-world applications.
In their report, Frost and Sullivan say:
QuartzClinical’s combination of machine learning technology, artificial intelligence, and precision analytics can provide results quickly.
…
Frost & Sullivan’s market research finds that Surgisphere’s QuartzClinical healthcare data analytics platform connects all data together through its artificial intelligence and machine learning engines so that healthcare organization can make better decisions using benchmark analysis of staff performance. The level 5 machine learning capability will help Surgisphere’s platform enter the healthcare industry mainstream in the short term.