Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Joe Paduda of Managed Care Matters discusses rising Workers Comp cost in California: Of particular interest is the growing prevalence of unlisted codes in physical medicine (PM). Last year saw a huge jump in PM services coded as 97799 – “unlisted physical medicine”. Note that jump happened while the use of normal/traditional/common PM codes for…
The time may be fast approaching. A paper by Goh et al. 2024 sampled 50 physicians and examined which was better: physicians alone, physicians with access to GPT-4, or GPT-4 alone. The primary outcome was how well each group diagnosed the case (i.e., diagnostic reasoning score). The authors found that: The median diagnostic reasoning score…
Can voice-based AI help patients with diabetes move more quickly towards optimal insulin dosing? According to a Nayak et al. (2023) study out today in JAMA Network Open, the answer is yes. Question Can a voice-based conversational artificial intelligence (AI) application help patients with type 2 diabetes titrate basal insulin at home to achieve rapid…
The answer is, ‘not very’. That is according to a paper from Burman et al. (2022). Let’s say you want to schedule an appointment with a physician in your areas that is covered by your insurance. When you look up the physician, maybe you have found that the phone number no longer works, or that…
The American Medical Association surveyed its members between November and December of 2021 to examine their current use of telehealth. As outliend in the “2021 Telehealth Survey Report“, the key findings of the survey were: Uptake. 85% of physician use telehealth. 56% of respondents said they believe they will increase telehealth use in their practices.…
Will telehealth widen or reduce health disparities? Telehealth may make it easier for individuals who lack transportation to get access to medical care; on the other hand, those without high-speed internet or good cell phone connections could be disadvantaged. In a recent report, NCQA examined the future of telehealth and examined how to make sure…
Is telehealth over before it began? Let’s hope not. First, there is the clinical aspect. While telehealth was vital during the pandemic, it is unclear to what degree telehealth can fully substitute for in-person care (see Hatef et al. 2022). Likely telehealth is superior to in-person visits for some types of care, inferior for others,…
That is the question Kouri et al. (2022) aim to answer. They conduct a systematic literature review and meta-analysis and find: …overall [computerized clinical decision support systems] CDSS uptake was 34.2% (95% CI 23.2 to 47.1%). Uptake was only reported in 12.4% of studies that otherwise met inclusion criteria. Multivariable meta-regression revealed the following factors…
An interesting report from the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies examined the “Use of digital health tools in Europe: before, during and after COVID-19“. Digital health is important not only because the technologies facilitate communication and disease monitoring, but also the technologies facilitate the creation of data that can be used to better…
Electronic health records (EHR) are moderns marvels. The ability to communicate and safely store patient information has the potential to greatly improve quality of care. Implementing EHR, however, is not costless. There is of course the cost of the EHR system itself and the cost of training staff on how to use the EHR system.…