- The power to define poverty is the power to spend money – a lot of money.
- Mark Pauly questions the wisdom of the GOP’s Medicare reforms requiring price transparency and site neutral payments.
- Survey: Patients find the health care system confusing. They needed a survey to know that?
- Why haven’t we made more progress with personalized (gene-based) medicine?
- “[W]e argue that mink, more so than any other farmed species, pose a risk for the emergence of future disease outbreaks and the evolution of future pandemics.”
Category: Cost of Healthcare
Doctors: AI is Not Ready for Prime Time (But it Soon Will)
The New York Times talks to doctors who worry about whether artificial intelligence (AI) is up to the job of assisting in patient care.
In medicine, the cautionary tales about the unintended effects of artificial intelligence are already legendary.
There was the program meant to predict when patients would develop sepsis, a deadly bloodstream infection, that triggered a litany of false alarms. Another, intended to improve follow-up care for the sickest patients, appeared to deepen troubling health disparities.
AI is being tested in various ways. There is no Doctor AI yet, but the algorithms are embedded in decision-support software and even hardware that analyzes mammograms.
Friday Links
- Even moderate drinking can interfere with your sex life.(NYT)
- Medicare is spending $800 million a year on stents that are unnecessary and put patients at risk of complications like stroke, heart attack and death.
- Yglesias takes a critical look at the idea that non-pharmaceutical Covid interventions didn’t work.
- Scott Atlas: What to do in the next pandemic.
- Trump’s plan to bring back mental institutions for the homeless is serious.
- Why is the MSM ignoring 400 American “hostages” in Gaza?
Direct Primary Care is Taking Off, and Getting Noticed by Medical Journals
Medscape Medical News has discovered direct primary care (DPC). Medscape, owned my WebMD, is a medical news, peer-reviewed medical journal and educational website for doctors and other medical professionals. Dr. George Lundberg became its editor-in-chief in 1999, after 17 years as the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association.