When interpreting brain scans, the eyes can deceive. A numbers dispute over a potential Alzheimer's disease test in Eli Lilly & Co.'s pharmaceutical pipeline broke out in the pages of a prestigious medical journal last week. The test, which holds the potential to diagnose the presence of Alzheimer's-linked protein accumulation in the brain in living patients, has to be interpreted by doctors. Three physicians were enlisted by researchers conducting a Lilly-funded study to put a number on what they saw in scans, and they didn't always see eye to eye. The debate, and the fate of this test, matters greatly to people with dementia and their loved ones. It also sheds light on the use and potential abuse of median, a common statistical concept. While median can be very useful in analyzing and summarizing a large data set, it might obscure the results for individual cases.
Some guy in his pajamas, home sick with bronchitis and complaining online about it, could soon be contributing to a digital collection of medical information designed to help speed diagnoses and treatments. A doctor who is helping to prepare IBM's Watson computer system for work as a medical tool says such blog entries may be included in Watson's database. Watson is best known for handily defeating the world's best "Jeopardy!" players on TV earlier this year. IBM says Watson, with its ability to understand plain language, can digest questions about a person's symptoms and medical history and quickly suggest diagnoses and treatments. The company is still perhaps two years from marketing a medical Watson, and it says no prices have been established. But it envisions several uses, including a doctor simply speaking into a handheld device to get answers at a patient's bedside.
Health information exchange -- a process that aims to simplify and improve patient care by connecting doctors and hospitals -- hasn't been catching on as fast as policymakers hoped, a new survey finds. The results also show that organizations responsible for coordinating the digital exchange of patient records are rarely financially viable, and only a few support the type of information exchange that the government deems necessary. "Part of meaningfully using electronic health records is the ability to send and receive data between systems," Julia Adler-Milstein, one of the study's authors from Harvard Business School, told Reuters Health. "A lot of the value comes from having complete patient information at the point of care, and not all patients see the same doctor for their whole lives." One way to address that, she said, has been through government-funded regional health information organizations, or RHIOs.
Keeping its "eye on the prize, but feet on the ground," the advisory panel to the HIT Policy Steering Committee recently took a step closer to pushing back stage 2 of meaningful use. Such a delay, the committee said, would grant providers more time to incorporate other deadline-driven health IT projects -- most notable, the massive ICD-10 conversion -- into their agendas. "Timing has been a concern. The plan is aggressive, and rightfully so. It's not the legislation we're trying to keep up with, it's the need," said Paul Tang, MD, chairman of the meaningful use work group and CMIO at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, during the meeting. Tang and the committee have been detailing three options of late, the third of which is pushing stage 2 back until 2014. "Option three gives the opportunity to sync up your upgrades for ICD-10 and meaningful use stage 2," Tang said. The intent is plausible, according to Mandy Willis, an ICD-10 expert in Seattle.
Childs Medical Clinic in Samson, AL successfully attested for meaningful use of electronic health records on April 19. Practice administrator Jule Childs has several tips for peer organizations. The one physician, one nurse practitioner clinic spent three months working on collecting the data to attest. Several EHR vendors offer a dashboard application that tracks progress toward meeting meaningful use objectives. The dashboard, for instance, pinpointed patients seen each day but not added to the numerator for applicable meaningful use measures. Everyone in the office has to be involved in achieving meaningful use, Childs counsels.
For the first time, a man completely paralyzed from the chest down regained the ability to take several steps with support and stand on his own thanks to electric stimulation to his spinal cord, new research published in the Lancet shows. Rob Summers, 25, was paralyzed in 2006 after being hit by a car that jumped the curb. After undergoing intensive motion training, an electrical pulse generator that mimics the brain's signals for movement was implanted in his back and Summers was able to regain some voluntary motion during stimulation sessions that lasted up to two hours. It was the first time electric stimulation produced this result in a human, though previous tests on animals showed similar results.