“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
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“[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
I have been framing the future of health care as diagnosis through face-to-face interactions for making a diagnosis (and getting the patient to buy-in to the treatment plan) and ongoing maintenance or surveillance using telemedicine with supporting technologies. This article has forced me to reconsider how we might deploy artificial intelligence to support patients and clinicians during the triage and diagnosis stages of a medical journey. “Symptom checkers serve two main functions: they facilitate self-diagnosis and assist with self-triage. They typically provide the user with a list of potential diagnoses and a recommendation of how quickly they should seek care, … Read More
Select Key Findings Policy Issues Debating the Future: Does H@H Save Costs and Improve Patient Care? “[..] Recent studies of cost savings from H@H programs range from 20 percent (Reese 2021) to 40 percent (Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Levine et al. 2020). But these findings are not generalizable as they are based entirely on single case studies of highly structured programs involving small samples of very carefully selected patients. For example, the study of Brigham and Women’s program examined 91 adults who were admitted to the hospital’s ED and randomly assigned to the hospital vs home for treatment. [..] While … Read More
“[Authority Magazine’s Jake Frankel] can you articulate for our readers a few of the main benefits of having a patient in front of you? [Co-founder and CMO of HealthTap Geoff Rutledge] The most important point to emphasize is that the essential physician–patient interaction is direct face-to-face communication that allows a doctor to connect with their patient, engage with them, and enable them to share in detail what is going on with their lives and their health. And that this critical face-to-face communication can occur equally well either in an in-person, in-office setting or via high-resolution video and audio consultation. It’s … Read More
Excerpt – Amazon will stop offering its Amazon Care primary health-care services at the end of this year, according to an internal memo, after determining that it wasn’t “the right long-term solution for our enterprise customers.” The surprise move Wednesday is a major course correction in Amazon’s broader foray into healthcare. Amazon says the decision impacts only Amazon Care, and not its other health-care initiatives. “This decision wasn’t made lightly and only became clear after many months of careful consideration,” said Neil Lindsay, Amazon Health Services senior vice president, in the email to Amazon Health Services employees. “Although our enrolled … Read More
“A new review paper, published Monday in Nature Biotechnology, explores the wide range of apps rolled out to combat the pandemic [..]. Here are four questions that still need to be answered about how apps can combat Covid. [1] How do you get broad swaths of the public to adopt an app? “Contact tracing had a lot of problems,” said [physician and Director of Digital Medicine at Scripps Research Translational Institute and a co-author of the new paper Jay] Pandit. [..] The initial goal for the U.K. National Health Service’s Covid-19 app was to reach a 60% adoption rate. [..] … Read More
“Explanatory trials evaluating the efficacy and safety of adding a new drug or device to current clinical care (A vs A-plus) are traditionally powered to detect the smallest difference in clinical outcomes that would justify incorporating the new treatment into care, considering its added risks, costs, and burdens. For example, the median minimal clinically important difference in mortality targeted by acute care trials has been approximately 8%, implying that smaller differences in mortality might not justify incorporation of the new treatments into care. These types of trials ask, “is this new treatment better than current care by enough to offset … Read More
“Having analyzed health outcomes data from the independent National Committee for Quality Assurance, health plan member satisfaction surveys from J.D. Power, and internal data from our own organizations, we are confident that full implementation of five opportunities would improve clinical quality nationwide by 20%, increase access to care by 20%, and reduce health care spending by 15% to 20%. Reduce Expensive and Unnecessary Trips to the ER Reverse America’s Chronic-Disease Crisis – For members of large multispecialty medical groups such as Kaiser Permanente [KP], high blood pressure is a much more manageable problem [outside of KP, control rates hover around … Read More