“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
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“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
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