Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
In the past I have written about the limited evidence that wellness program work. So we should see that employers are abandoning these programs or at least scaling back? According to one recent study, however employers are actually increasing investments in wellness programs. The study surveys employers from over 500 companies with more than 100…
Interesting article on how human intelligence and artificial intelligence can be seen as complements rather than substitutes. Human+AI combinations have been shown to perform better than human or AI alone. Why? AIs are best at choosing answers. Humans are best at choosing questions. The advent of AI is not a zero sum game. The symbiotic…
Interesting video from Wired on how artificial intelligence (AI) software may help improve patient care in the future.
The site 99% Invisible has an interesting post on the invention of the stethoscope had how it transformed medicine. René Laennec actually felt that patient’s accounts of their own disease were still important, but the quest for objective information about disease was underway, and the stethoscope was just the beginning. Now we have X-rays, CT…
Should health insurers cover orphan drugs? Although the clear answer appears to be yes, the issue is tricky. An orphan drug is one which treats a limited number of people. In Europe, this designation generally applies to patients with a disease with an overall prevalence between 5 and 10,000 individuals. In order to incentivize innovators…
An article by Ajay Agrawal and Avi Goldfarb (“The Simple Economics of Machine Intelligence“) provide an interesting perspective on how machine learning will affect employment with a nice example from the health care sector. All human activities can be described by five high-level components: data, prediction, judgment, action, and outcomes. For example, a visit to the…
Many people have feared that robots, computers, and other forms of technology will take people’s jobs. Conventional wisdom holds that healthcare workers have been largely immune from these technological changes to date. However, a new paper from Lu, Rui and Seidmann examines whether technological advances–specifically computerized provider order entry (CPOE)–affects employment at nursing homes. Using…
Wearables, digital medicine and ‘beyond-the-pill’ are the latest healthcare craze. New technologies–particular those combined with patients mobile phones–offer the promise of improving patient health. One question is will insurance companies, the government and other payers actually reimburse for these technologies. According to a recent FiercePharma article, the answer is yes…if there is evidence. Payers say they’re willing…
Marketplace reports: On a recent visit to the hospital, Riley, who is five years old, swallowed a tiny white pill with an embedded sensor – roughly the size of a grain of sand. When it reached her stomach, it sent a signal to a patch she’s wearing on her skin and alerted her parents and…
Health technology assessments aim to evaluate the costs and benefits of various healthcare treatments and technology. Many organizations that conduct HTAs say they wish to incorporate the patient perspective. In practice, this does not happen often. When it does, there are a number of methodological complexities. How do you incorporate the patient perspective into HTA? A…