“In recent months, executives have touted Teladoc as a source for “whole-person care” — a bid to distinguish it from smaller virtual companies addressing only one condition, or those who largely make money by facilitating prescriptions. The company offers primary care, urgent care, and virtual appointments, coaching, and disease management for chronic diseases such as diabetes and for mental health conditions. About a third of patients in Teladoc’s chronic care programs are using more than one — and that number has grown year-over-year and sequentially, executives said during a Wednesday earning call. Earlier this year, Teladoc unrolled its integrated care … Read More
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“the new coaching service — codenamed Quartz — sounds like an expansion of the Apple Watch play from physical health to mental health, Bloomberg reported. It is “designed to keep users motivated to exercise, improve eating habits and help them sleep better” using “AI and data from an Apple Watch to make suggestions and create coaching programs tailored to specific users.” [..] About five years ago, I wrote about the various ways that the Apple Watch failed as a behavioral intervention. There’s some behavioral science, but also — because I was using it — I discovered that the constant nudging for achievement made me miserable. … Read More
Excerpt – The challenges uncovered by the project [reviews of AI compiled by researchers at Duke] point to a dawning realization about AI’s use in health care: building the algorithm is the easiest part of the work. The real difficulty lies in figuring out how to incorporate the technology into the daily routines of doctors and nurses, and the complicated care-delivery and technical systems that surround them. AI must be finely tuned to those environments and evaluated within them, so that its benefits and costs can be clearly understood and compared. As it stands, health systems are not set up … Read More
“ONC seeks to implement provisions of the 21st Century Cures Act and make updates to the ONC Health IT Certification Program (Certification Program) with new and updated standards, certification criteria, andimplementation specifications in 45 CFR Part 170. The proposed rule also includes multiple requests forinformation (RFI) to inform potential future rulemaking. RFI topic areas include electronic prior authorization, lab interoperability, predictive decision support interventions, and advanced Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR®) capabilities, among others across parts 170 and 171. We look forward to receiving public comment on these proposals and direct interested parties to the following link in order to … Read More
“While I’m often a patient who hates the experience of talking to my doctor through a laptop, I’m also a researcher who has devoted a large part of his career to better understanding what happens when new technologies are added to clinical spaces. From this perspective, I see three major challenges that have to be overcome before large language models can really serve as clinical scribes. The truth challenge. [..] There are two major chokepoints where hands-free AI could lead to inaccurate medical records. The first is in the speech-to-text technology. When the university where I teach pivoted online for … Read More
“Online prescribing rules for controlled drugs were relaxed three years ago under emergency waivers to ensure critical medications remained available during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has proposed a rule that would reinstate most previously longstanding requirements that doctors see patients in person before prescribing narcotic drugs such as Oxycontin, amphetamines such as Adderall, and a host of other potentially dangerous drugs. The aim is to reduce improper prescribing of these drugs by telehealth companies that boomed during the pandemic. Given the ongoing opioid epidemic, allowing continued broad use of telemedicine prescribing “would pose too great … Read More
“Insomnia is one of the most common sleep disorders, posing a significant public health concern, with an estimated prevalence of 10–30% among adults in the general population. These numbers are greater among patients, with reports estimating 69% prevalence among primary care patients. Insomnia disorder is defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – IV (DSM-IV) as the complaint for difficulty in initiating or maintaining sleep, or restorative sleep for at least 1 month. [..] Depression and anxiety are the most common comorbid mental disorders associated with insomnia which can also exacerbate the sleep disorder. Recently, epidemiologic studies … Read More
“What kinds of new minds are being released into our world? The response to ChatGPT, and to the other chatbots that have followed in its wake, has often suggested that they are powerful, sophisticated, imaginative, and possibly even dangerous. But is that really true? If we treat these new artificial-intelligence tools as mysterious black boxes, it’s impossible to say. Only by taking the time to investigate how this technology actually works—from its high-level concepts down to its basic digital wiring—can we understand what we’re dealing with. We send messages into the electronic void, and receive surprising replies. But what, exactly, … Read More
“[Roge Karma, senior editor for the “Ezra Klein Show,” a podcast on the New York Times] From Patrick A: ‘[..] So what do you make of the most dire assessments of the risks posed by A.I.? And what level of alarm do you feel about its dangers, and why?’ [Ezra Klein] [..] He [Dan Hendrycks, an AI safety research] wrote a recent paper [..] called “Natural Selection Favors A.I.s Over Humans,” and the point of his paper is I think it offers a more intuitive idea of how we could get into some real trouble, whether or not you’re thinking … Read More
“Roughly one in five American adults has a mental illness. An estimated one in twenty has what’s considered a serious mental illness—major depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia—that profoundly impairs the ability to live, work, or relate to others. Decades-old drugs such as Prozac and Xanax, once billed as revolutionary antidotes to depression and anxiety, have proved less effective than many had hoped; care remains fragmented, belated, and inadequate; and the over-all burden of mental illness in the U.S., as measured by years lost to disability, seems to have increased. Suicide rates have fallen around the world since the nineteen-nineties, but in … Read More