All posts in Health Information Technology

“The idea of medical transparency undergirding provisions in the 2016 Cures Act is broadly supported. But implementation of the regulations expanding access to medical records, which took effect in 2021, has been more divisive. Congress has taken little interest in this issue, and federal health officials have stood by the rules, arguing that concerns will be resolved as technology improves and as medical practices adjust how they prepare patients for results. “There is just a moral imperative here, which is for patients, this is their information. They ought to be able to access it whenever they want,” said Micky Tripathi, … Read More

“Already, we are being told that A.I. is making coders and customer service representatives and writers more productive. At least one chief executive plans to add ChatGPT use in employee performance evaluations. But I’m skeptical of this early hype. It is measuring A.I.’s potential benefits without considering its likely costs — the same mistake we made with the internet. I worry we’re headed in the wrong direction in at least three ways. One is that these systems will do more to distract and entertain than to focus. Right now, the large language models tend to hallucinate information: Ask them to … Read More

“At the South by Southwest conference in March, where health startups displayed their products, there was a near-religious conviction that AI could rebuild health care, offering apps and machines that could diagnose and treat all kinds of illnesses, replacing doctors and nurses. Unfortunately, in the mental health space, evidence of effectiveness is lacking. Few of the many apps on the market have independent outcomes research showing they help; most haven’t been scrutinized at all by the FDA. Though marketed to treat conditions such as anxiety, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and depression, or to predict suicidal tendencies, many warn users (in small print) that they … Read More

Why predictions of an imminent economic revolution are overstated Excerpt – [..] in the 1960s Robert Fogel published work about America’s railways that would later win him a Nobel Prize in economics. Many thought that rail transformed America’s prospects, turning an agricultural society into an industrial powerhouse. In fact, it had a very modest impact, Fogel found, because it replaced technology—such as canals—that would have done just about as good a job. The level of per-person income that America achieved by January 1st 1890 would have been reached by March 31st 1890 if railways had never been invented. Of course, … Read More

“the American Medical Informatics Association, with seed funding from the National Library of Medicine, formed a group under the moniker of 25 × 5 to reduce clinician documentation burden by three-quarters during the next 5 years. A workshop in 2022 allied with the 25 × 5 initiative identified 6 major EHR issues: Based on those discussions and our professional observations, 4 issues emerged as most salient and 3 as most actionable. The continued lack of nationally used unique personal safety identifiers for health as originally mandated in the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) in the mid-1990s presents a continuing threat to privacy, … Read More

“Large language models (LLMs) are a type of deep learning model that are trained on vast amounts of text data with the goal of generating new text that closely resembles human responses. The release of ChatGPT (OpenAI, San Francisco, CA, USA), an LLM-based chatbot, on Nov 30, 2022, propelled LLMs to the forefront of public attention and made them accessible to millions of people to experiment with. Since then, medical practitioners and researchers have been exploring potential applications of LLMs, as much of medical practice and research revolve around large text-based tasks, such as presentations, publications, documentation, and reporting. [..] Ethical … Read More