Tech

Both physicians and patients need to stop viewing technological tools as threats

Tech
January 7, 2020

A recent study published in Science, one of the world’s leading academic journals, found that a predictive health care algorithm discriminated against black patients.

The tool, created by Optum, was designed to identify high-risk patients with untreated chronic diseases, thereby helping administrators re-distribute medical resources to those who’d benefit the most. But there was a glitch in the algorithm, according to researchers. Rather than ranking the needs …

Read more…

The robot will see you now

Tech
December 24, 2019

The year is 2050. You enter the room, ready to speak with your next patient, a 60-year-old white male with recent episodes of chest pain when he climbs the stairs to his office. Before sitting down to speak with him, a monitor in the room pulls up his recent lab work and current medications. Your patient note is being filled in, but nobody is typing; the computer is avidly listening …

Read more…

Health care needs new presentation techniques

Tech
December 1, 2019

“So, if you look at this table, you can see that group X had a small but statistically significant increase in mortality over group Y. What does that tell us? It suggests that maybe there is some signal that intervention A is better than intervention B.”

The slide has some table from some journal, and the speaker will then often circle some p-value and talk about the strengths and weaknesses of …

Read more…

Voice to text solutions could turn EHR-burdened medical professionals into doctors again

Tech
November 25, 2019

Just imagine the following: your assistant invites in Ms. Nichols, who has a migraine, a bad cough, and feels nauseated. You sit down, start talking about the symptoms, see her throat, measure her temperature, pulse rate, inquire more about the headache. In the end, you set up a diagnosis, you write a prescription for some meds, send the patient for some further exams due to the migraine, but ensure her …

Read more…

The healing patient-physician analog relationship is in critical condition

Tech
November 7, 2019

In the history of medical care, medical records served one purpose and two masters: to record diagnosis and treatment for physicians to refer to and for patients to use to transfer care when they desired. The medical record was a simple 3 x 5 or ledger card in the 1950s. The patient paid directly for care at the time of service. Usually, the physician had a nurse and a spouse …

Read more…

We need to find the Steve Jobs of health care tech

Tech
October 19, 2019

A featured article titled “Death by A Thousand Clicks” addressed some of the serious problems and challenges we still face in the “digitization” of health care.

As an early adopter of EHR since 2003 and a self-avowed “techie,” I can vouch for the fact that many of the government initiatives in HIT, like “meaningful use,” actually made many EHRs worse.

Why?

Because many of the regulations were being written by …

Read more…

Artificial intelligence in medicine raises legal and ethical concerns

Tech
September 29, 2019

The use of artificial intelligence in medicine is generating great excitement and hope for treatment advances.

AI generally refers to computers’ ability to mimic human intelligence and to learn. For example, by using machine learning, scientists are working to develop algorithms that will help them make decisions about cancer treatment. They hope that computers will be able to analyze …

Read more…

The keyboard is the sworn enemy of physicians

Tech
September 26, 2019

During one long ago very hot Washington, DC summer, at the suggestion of my parents, I enrolled in a typing course that was given at our elementary school.

This was the summer between sixth and seventh grades, and there were lots of things I would’ve preferred to have been doing, but my dad, who started out in advertising, felt that touch-typing …

Read more…

Here’s why health care innovations stay secret

Tech
September 26, 2019

Having been an improvement advisor with many quality improvement initiatives and collaboratives, I have observed that stories about successful initiatives too often leave out major relational barriers that got in the way as well as the critical interventions necessary to overcome them.

That important details about relational challenges so often remain hidden is not a small problem. Evidence points to relational issues as a major cause of lack of expected success …

Read more…

It’s time for AI-enabled solutions in health care to live up to their buzz

Tech
September 24, 2019

Artificial intelligence is incredibly buzzy in health care right now, and for a good reason. Other industries are already experiencing AI-enabled radical transformations, like real-time fraud monitoring and detection in banking and finance and instantaneous image recognition across the web and social media. Health care now stands similarly positioned to capitalize on the transformative power of machine learning, and the massive potential is driving levels of investment expected to Read more…

It’s OK if doctors can’t memorize everything

Tech
September 22, 2019

The storage capacity of the human mind is amazing. One estimate of the size of the brain’s “RAM” is as high as  2.5 petabytes (a million gigabytes). The number is based on the total number of neurons in the brain and the total number of possible connections per neuron. I suspect it is an overestimate, given the vagaries and innate inefficiency of biological systems. Nevertheless, the true figure …

Read more…

It’s time we get the technology working for the patients, and not make their lives more difficult

Tech
September 17, 2019

In a world where, in a moment, I can order from thousands of items and have them delivered to my doorstep the same or next day at the press of a button without having to re-enter my name, address, and billing information each time, it would seem that filling out paper forms at the doctor’s office by hand to have someone else re-enter the information into a computer that doesn’t …

Read more…

If you spend more than 80 percent of your day staring at a screen, you are no longer a doctor

Tech
September 16, 2019

The use of health care information technology has increased exponentially over the last five years, and as a frontline physician, I have seen this change at close quarters. In most of the hospitals I’ve worked in up and down the East Coast, it’s been interesting to observe this transformation. The process has usually started with nurses and then moved on to encompass doctors. It’s overall a good thing, as I Read more…

Virtual scribes are game-changers for physicians

Tech
September 16, 2019

Today was like no other day. It was our first day together.

Me and my “virtual” scribe — an actual person who seems to “virtually” to exist inside of a Jabra speaker on my desk and so subtlety that I forgot to mute a few times when not seeing patients. The “man” in the Jabra speaker now knows just how long of an appointment I need for my hair, and that …

Read more…

How EMRs can actually help physicians

Tech
September 12, 2019

Collaboration is the key.

When I think about how hard it is to take care of our patients, and how many different people are involved in their care, it’s a wonder that anything ever gets done.

We need to simplify systems, and harness the power of the information systems available to us, as well as the promise of the electronic medical record, …

Read more…

5 clinician concerns about OpenNotes

Tech
September 12, 2019

More than 200 health organizations have now implemented OpenNotes. Many more are piloting, are soon to implement — or have implemented, and we don’t know it! For more than three years I’ve been fortunate to represent OpenNotes to potential implementers, and I’m confident I’ve heard almost every clinician concern or anxiety regarding what might happen when patients read their own notes.

Here are the five most common concerns I’ve heard — …

Read more…

A slow death by charting

Tech
September 10, 2019

It’s 10 p.m.

Seven days before Christmas.

I’m sitting at work “finishing” up some charts.

I am suddenly overcome with anger.

What am I doing here right now at this minute? I am helping no one.

This work I’m typing away at — trying so hard not to scream — it’s hoops. Fucki*g hoops … for insurance companies. So I can beg them to pay me. Pay me pennies for the hard, good, compassionate, humanitarian …

Read more…

53
pages

CME Spotlights

✓ Join 150,000+ subscribers
✓ Get KevinMD's most popular stories