Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
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…
In the future, will your recommended cancer treatment be decided by a computer? That is what IBM hopes with the launch of their Watson for Genomics project. CNET reports: Typically, finding the appropriate treatment for a specific patient means sequencing his or her genome — the complete DNA structure packed into a single cell —…
The Economist reports that adverse events occur relatively frequently when physicians insert catheters: placing needles inside veins deep in the body is notoriously difficult. Some 15-30% of attempts suffer complications, mainly punctured arteries that can lead to infection (around 250,000 cases in America annually), but also bleeding, collapsed lungs and even cardiac arrest. Failure rates in…
Wearable technology is all the rage. There was even a recent paper in JAMA about wearable technology. However, will wearables soon to be old news? What is the future? Joe Kvedar gives his thoughts on the topic: Thus, we have plentiful pedometer apps…We’ve also solved how to run these apps in the background without disrupting the…
Robert Pearl’s MedX keynote address gives some reasons. Many New Technologies Don’t Address The Real Problem. Tech entrepreneurs often take a backward approach to invention. They start by discovering a nifty technology. Later, they figure out how people can use it…Alan Cooper, considered by many to be the father of modern user experience design (UXD),…