Tag: "health IT"

Wireless Medicine Means Better Quality, and Other Links

iPhone medicine: it’s cheaper, faster and maybe better. (video)

Controversy over obesity studies. HT: Tyler Cowen.

How to keep the NSA from listening to you phone calls. HT: David Henderson.

Rand Paul makes fun of the new ICD-10 codes. (video)

Watson as Big Brother, and Other Links

IBM’s Watson is the proto-type for the NSA’s monitoring of billions of phone calls and other data.

“Denmark is the most civic-minded, egalitarian, free market-oriented, and happiest place on Earth.”

Why we need the TSA: “After all, if airplanes were no more secure than city buses then we’d see terrorists blowing up airplanes about as often as they blow up city buses.”

Robots as Therapists

The session begins:

The virtual therapist sits in a big armchair, shuffling slightly and blinking naturally, apparently waiting for me to get comfortable in front of the screen.

“Hi, I’m Ellie,” she says. “Thanks for coming in today.”

Right now there are two assistants guiding the avatar, but:

Real people come in to answer Ellie’s questions every day as part of the research, and the computer is gradually learning how to react in every situation.

It is being taught how to be human, and to respond as a doctor would to the patients’ cues.

Soon Ellie will be able to go it alone.

Tyler Cowen. Article here.

Family Medical Costs Still Rising, and Other Links

The typical cost to cover a family of four now exceeds $22,000, including the amount paid in insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs, according to Milliman.

Can dyslexia be good for you?

An iPhone application lets users check levels of blood, protein and other substances in their urine. (I’m trying to imagine how that would work?)

Solution for Elder Care: Robots

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed Cody, a robotic nurse the university says is “gentle enough to bathe elderly patients.” There is also HERB, which is short for Home Exploring Robot Butler. Made by researchers at Carnegie Mellon, it is designed to fetch household objects like cups and can even clean a kitchen. Hector, a robot that is being developed by the University of Reading in England, can remind patients to take their medicine, keep track of their eyeglasses and assist in the event of a fall.

The technology is nearly there. But some researchers worry that we are not asking a fundamental question: Should we entrust the care of people in their 70s and older to artificial assistants rather than doing it ourselves? (NYT)

Health IT to Raise Costs, and Other Links

73% of doctors: Health IT will raise quality; 71%: it will also raise costs.

Fidelity: A 65-year-old couple retiring this year will need $220,000 on average to cover medical expenses.

The highest paid public employee in your state is… [HT: Jason Shafrin]

Headlines I Wish I Hadn’t Seen

The Obama administration argues that the sequester is (harmfully) preventing vaccinations for the poor, even though their new budget calls for an even larger cut.

More than 90 percent of medical specialists who diagnose and manage Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in preschoolers do not follow treatment guidelines.

Maryland BlueCross has filed for an average increase of 25 percent for individual coverage, warning young people could pay as much as 150 percent more.

U.S. hospitals are absorbing an estimated $8.3 billion annual hit in lost productivity and increased patient discharge times because of outmoded technology.

Why Doctors Hate Electronic Medical Records

Unsent letter to the Tech Department:

So today I’m doing anesthesia for colonoscopies and upper GI scopes. Nowadays we have three board-certified anesthesiologists doing anesthesia for GI procedures every single day at my institution. I’ll probably do 8 cases today. I will sign into a computer or electronically sign something 32 times. I have to type my username and password into 3 different systems 24 times. I’m doing essentially the same thing with each case, but each case has to have the same information entered separately. I have to do these things, but my department also pays four full-time masters-level trained nurses to enter patient information and medical histories into the computer system, sometimes transcribed from a different computer system. Ironically, I will also generate about 50 pages of paper, since the computer record has to be printed out. Twice.

No wonder almost everyone I know hates electronic medical records! I don’t know anything about computers, and I don’t know what systems other hospitals have. I may be dreaming of a world that doesn’t exist or that world is here and I haven’t heard about it.

HT: Jason Shafrin.

Headlines I Wish I Hadn’t Seen

Companies won’t even look at resumes of the long-term unemployed.

Telemedicine may not be cutting costs.

Nation’s largest theater chain cuts work week, blaming ObamaCare.

White House brain initiative may be stymied by the medical device tax.

We Pay More for Drugs. Do We Get More?

A contributor to higher U.S. per capita drug spending is faster uptake of new and more expensive prescription drugs in the United States relative to other countries. In contrast, the other OECD countries employed mechanisms such as health technology assessment and restrictions on patients’ eligibility for new prescription drugs, and they required strict evidence of the value of new drugs.

Source: Health Affairs.