Tag: "health IT"

High-Tech Innovations in Medicine

Virtual Care: Doctors in remote ‘command centers’ are increasingly keeping tabs on vital signs of patients in intensive-care units.
Medical Detectives: Got a hard-to-diagnosis ailment? Patients can now post their symptoms online and offer a reward for a diagnosis from a host of doctors.
Doctor on Demand: You can have a virtual consultation with a physician for nonemergency medical issues.
Personal Care: Bedside tablets let hospital patients text the nurse. Patients can check their own charts and lab results.
Transparency: New insurance tools let patients compare the price of care between hospitals and calculate out-of-pocket costs.

Diabetes Monitoring 24/7

Most glucometers use ancient technology that provides only a snapshot of information….Many diabetics still log their results using pen and paper.

[T]wo diabetes meters that aim to change that are able to instantly send results to a smartphone over a Bluetooth wireless connection. Each offers an app that collects and analyzes the readings, and gives a picture of how their users are doing over time. Both apps can also send reports from the phone to a doctor or other person. (WSJ)

Dec 20, 2013 | 10 comments | by John Goodman

Hits and Misses

Can robots replace doctors? HT: Tyler

Yglesias: the case against dividends. (Interesting throughout)

Claims of virgin births in U.S. near 1 percent.

Marijuana use mimics schizophrenia in your brain.

There is no such thing as a Styrofoam cup.

Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen”: She really existed and she was worse than even Reagan believed.

Health Wonk Review is up.

Dec 19, 2013 | 12 comments | by John Goodman

Hits and Misses

Would you like a bot that answers emails for you?

The next big thing: Personalized heart care.

Fruit flies with better sex lives live longer.

Tyler Cowen explains why he didn’t do 23andMe.

Can ObamaCare be sold at the mall?

Government tax and spending policies combine to redistribute more than $2 trillion from the top 40 percent of families to the bottom 60 percent.

Dec 02, 2013 | 16 comments | by John Goodman

Britain Abandons £11 Billion Health IT Project

A plan to create the world’s largest single civilian computer system linking all parts of the National Health Service is to be abandoned by the Government after running up billions of pounds in bills. Ministers are expected to announce next month that they are scrapping a central part of the much-delayed and hugely controversial 10-year National Programme for IT. (More)

Nov 04, 2013 | 16 comments | by John Goodman

Headlines I Wish I Hadn’t Seen

For the first month alone, the Obama administration projected that nearly a half million people would sign up in the new health insurance markets.

The federal health care exchange was built using 10-year-old technology that may require constant fixes and updates for the next six months and the eventual overhaul of the entire system.

Insurers say the federal health-care marketplace is generating flawed data that is straining their ability to handle even the trickle of enrollees who have gotten through so far.

Oct 18, 2013 | 12 comments | by John Goodman

Is Medicine More Art than Science?

Our society has little tolerance for doctors who miss diagnoses (fear of malpractice suits drives a depressing number of decisions in health care), but this and other scenes in “One Doctor” reveal just how tricky diagnosing someone can be. Patients conceal things or grow delirious; symptoms contradict each other; scanners give false positives and false negatives. Despite modern technology, diagnosing people remains more art than science — even a sort of white magic.