Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
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.…
That is the finding from a recent Health Affairs article by Desai et al. (2021). We launched a large online advertising campaign to increase consumers’ awareness about insurer-specific negotiated price information available on New Hampshire’s public price transparency website. Our campaign led to a more than 600 percent increase in visits to the website. However, in…
We have heard much about how COVID-19 has created a paradigm shift in the use of telemedicine. A paper by Patel et al. (2021) uses claims data between January 1, 2020, to June 16, 2020 to measure this trend quantitatively. They find that in a largely commercially-insured population: In the COVID-19 period, 30.1 percent of…
There has been much hype about how artificial intelligence (AI) can revolutionize health care. Has it been able to do so? According to a The Economist‘s Technology Quarterly on AI and its limits, the answer is not as much as we had hoped. First, the hype: PWC…predicts that artificial intelligence will add $16trn to the…
What factors predict use of telemedicine? A paper by Reed et al. (2020) uses primary care data from Kaiser Permanente between 2016 and 2018 to find the answer. Note that these results are pre-COVID. Choosing telemedicine was statistically significantly associated with patient sociodemographic characteristics. For example, patients aged 65 years and over were less likely…
Electronic health records (EHR) are supposed to improve quality. While EHRs certainly are highly useful for information sharing, they may have adverse consequences. One issue may be that EHRs may induce fatigue in physicians and sap their needed energy/concentration away from their primary task: caring for patients. To test whether EHRs increase physician fatigue and…
What are digital therapeutics? What evidence is needed to support their value? How should we pay for them? I participated in Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy (AMCP) Partnership Forum: Digital Therapeutics which took place in September 2019. The findings from that forum are presented in a recent JMCP article. An excerpt from the article is…