Researchers posing as patients with skin problems sought help from 16 online telemedicine companies—with unsettling results. Some of the online doctors misdiagnosed syphilis, herpes and skin cancer, and some prescribed medications without asking key questions about patients’ medical histories or warning of adverse effects, the researchers found. Two sites linked users with doctors located overseas who aren’t licensed to practice where the patients were located, as required by state law.
On Monday morning, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services kicks off a competition to redesign medical bills and the billing process for consumers. Federal health officials are overhauling health care to bring more “value” to the system. “Part of the billing challenge is trying to help patients understand what their financial responsibility is going to be as early on in the process as possible,” said Greg Meyers, an executive with the hospital system INTEGRIS Health in Oklahoma, one of the providers committed to testing the winning designs.
St. Charles Health System says it will hire roughly 100 permanent “Epic analysts” as it heads into the massive process of switching its electronic patient records system, an undertaking that will take years and cost several million dollars. St. Charles announced last week it plans to switch from Paragon, its current electronic health records vendor, to Epic, one of the most widely used EHR vendors nationwide. The new positions will be filled largely by people who already work for the organization and understand its operations, but hires could come from outside as well.
“We want real-time feedback about how we’re doing,” Holy Spirit vice president of operations Kyle Snyder said. “So, you’ve got to have a way to basically acknowledge the fact that perhaps we don’t get everything right every time.” The local affiliate of the Geisinger health care system now has that mechanism in the form of an app.
With a bulky camera eye and spindly hydraulic arm, this medical robot looks like it could fit in on an automotive production line. The surgical bot is named STAR, or Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot, and it just performed the world's first autonomous, soft-tissue surgery. STAR is the creation of a team of computer scientists and medical researchers led by Peter Kim, a biochemist at the Children's National Health System in Washington D.C.
There’s a lot of hype these days over nanoparticle-based cancer treatments, which try to shoot minuscule packages carrying drugs right to tumors. While many have succeeded in mice, very few have actually worked in clinical trials. Biochemist Warren Chan and his colleagues wanted to see how often those nanoparticle efforts fail, and what, if anything, could change that.