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 …
“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…
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 headach…
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…
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 “tech…
Anyone who has spent any time on the internet knows better than to spend much time on the comments from an opinion piece. The comments section, even one on a site as reputable and respected as the New York Times, is often a minefield of trolls, contrar…
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 wo…
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 interve…
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 instanta…
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 connec…
