“less than one third of physicians graduating from primary care residency programs plan on practicing primary care. Often-cited culprits of this workforce shortage include burnout, administrative burdens, income disparities between PCPs [primary care physicians] and specialists, and loss of autonomy amid a shift toward increased ownership of physician practices by health care systems and corporations. Increasingly, however, the shortage of PCPs is being exacerbated by another phenomenon: the evolution of primary care — long championed as a common good — into a private, free-market commodity. [..] most DPC practices operate entirely outside the insurance system, with patients paying a monthly … Read More
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Besides being launched by Amazon alumni, General Medicine has close business ties to a senior Amazon health exec Excerpt – A new digital health care marketplace, launched last week, has a good amount of Amazon in its DNA. General Medicine, with $32 million in funding, came out of stealth with three former Amazon employees as co-founders and investors, a business model that could compete with Amazon’s One Medical — and behind the scenes, a current senior Amazon executive. The former employees, including the founders of PillPack — the pharmacy company that Amazon bought in 2018 for about $750 million and … Read More
New systems for documenting outpatient visits are adding features and moving into hospitals; ‘we are just scratching the surface’ Excerpt – “We are just scratching the surface of what this technology can do,” says Dr. Lance Owens, regional chief medical information officer at University of Michigan Health, which uses Microsoft’s DAX Copilot ambient-listening technology. “I see it being able to provide insights about the patient that the human mind just can’t do in a reasonable time.” By connecting older data with new information in the medical record, for instance, the technology could help make sure that an incidental finding years ago was followed … Read More
Results could help build case for insurance coverage for prescription digital therapeutics “In a new report, the Peterson Health Technology Institute (PHTI) finds that Rejoyn, an app for depression from Otsuka Precision Health, and DaylightRx, an app for anxiety from Big Health, warrant further adoption because their clinical trials show strong evidence of benefits. Both apps are intended to be used alongside ongoing mental health treatment, and in most cases, the institute found the apps will save money. PHTI was founded in 2023 with $50 million to conduct independent evaluations of health technology. Its findings, both positive and negative, have ruffled feathers in the industry, and have … Read More
“A wave of new ventures is no doubt poised to deliver fresh possibilities in DTC [direct-to-consumer] health care. However, Big Tech is uniquely positioned to scale their own DTC health care services rapidly and efficiently or can choose to provide the technological backbone for traditional HCOs [health care organizations] or new entrant startups. Big Tech platforms have hundreds of millions of users and access to hyperpersonalized data from search, social media interactions, mobility data, and LLM [large language model] engagement. Google Search has long been a de facto patient decision support tool for diagnosis and more, well before being tuned … Read More
After years being medicated for mental health problems, one patient began to suspect the cause of her suffering could be found in the drugs themselves. Excerpt – she [author of “Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance” Laura Delano] encountered Robert Whitaker’s 2010 book, “Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America.” The question Mr. Whitaker asked was simple: How is it possible that rates of mental illness have skyrocketed in parallel with the development of so many supposedly groundbreaking psychiatric drugs? Mr. Whitaker’s book forced Ms. Delano to pose a … Read More
“To paraphrase health policy expert Timothy Hoff, there is a fight going on for the soul of health care, and primary care is at the center of the struggle. In the United States, we face an unresolved tension between two conflicting visions: Does our society want an empathetic, highly relational care delivery system built around primary care and trusting relationships, or, as Hoff puts it, “a more efficient, convenient, and highly transactional care delivery system, impersonal and built on algorithms, health care corporations, and technology”? [..] Increasingly, health care organizations and information technology vendors, recognizing the need to better support … Read More
“Modern medicine is compartmentalized, which can work for acute injuries. But chronic conditions demand cross-specialty coordination. Inflammation, diet and stress are intertwined. AI’s broad-based knowledge provided the holistic lens I needed. [..] A study of 2008 data found that chronic pain costs today’s U.S. economy about $900 billion a year, adjusted for inflation. That’s more than heart disease and cancer combined, according to the National Academy of Medicine. One in 5 American adults—50 million people—live with chronic pain. Our healthcare system is great at treating broken bones but falters when dealing with lingering aches and fatigue. Who unifies the data from … Read More
“The process of extracting systemic health insights by analyzing ocular data, including retinal images with AI, is referred to as oculomics. We define prescreening as a preliminary assessment of disease or potential disease in asymptomatic individuals. Healthcare From the Eye (Topcon Healthcare Inc) prescreening is utilization of retinal images to identify ocular or systemic disease or potential disease in asymptomatic individuals in a coordinated care system that includes eye care professionals (ECPs), primary care professionals (PCPs), and specialty care professionals using secure and responsible technology. It offers the potential for rapid, cost-effective, and accessible prescreening for a wide range of devastating diseases. Such … Read More
The tool will allow women to screen for HPV, which causes almost all cases of cervical cancer, without visiting a doctor. Excerpt – The Food and Drug Administration approved the United States’ first at-home cervical cancer screening tool on Friday, a decision that stands to give women an accessible alternative to Pap smears, which many find painful or traumatic. The new test, made by Teal Health, involves swabbing the vagina with a spongelike tool rather than inserting a speculum and scraping cells from the cervix, as health care providers do in Pap smears. [..] Cervical cancer experts told The New … Read More