Category: Tech

Death by 1,000 clicks: Where electronic health records went wrong

The pain radiated from the top of Annette Monachelli’s head, and it got worse when she changed positions. It didn’t feel like her usual migraine. The 47-year-old Vermont attorney turned innkeeper visited her local doctor at the Stowe Family Practice tw…

Telemedicine and access: Leave no patient behind

Telehealth, using video to have an acute medical care visit, puts some of the power of choice back into our patient’s hands. To best frame telehealth and its use cases, the National Quality Forum published a report in 2017, outlining the following four…

Could patients be their own scribes?

One day while on shift in the emergency department, I looked out into the waiting room at the dozens of people waiting to be seen.  Many had been waiting for hours. Some looked bored. Others appeared agitated by the long wait time. One thing that nearl…

Carefully consider every aspect of the integration of AI into health care

AI, artificial intelligence, is all the rage right now in medical news media. And this has many practicing physicians, even medical students, concerned. Will AI make diagnose heavy specialties such as dermatology and radiology obsolete? Can AI give ris…

Knowing how artificial intelligence works empowers clinicians to be at the forefront of using it

Physicians and other health care professionals are uniquely suited to understand artificial intelligence. They’ve studied or routinely use mathematics, data analysis, and algorithms. They comprehend pattern recognition, decision trees, rules-base…

Will blockchain become the coin of the medical realm?

First, there was Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency that utilizes blockchain, a decentralized system of data collection and transactions that we are told will defy hacking. (Wasn’t the Titanic said to be unsinkable?) We read that cryptocurrency and other blockc…

Understanding 6 trends shaping health care through gastroenterology

If you throw a pebble today, it’s likely to land on an article that talks about how artificial intelligence and its brother — machine learning — are changing health care. Yes, I get it broadly. But I was curious to explore how exactly health care…

How telemedicine is increasing diversity in clinical trials

An important part of advancing medical research and drug development is making participation in clinical trials easier and more inclusive. To develop treatments that work on men, women, and children of all ages and different ethnicities we need to have…

What if EMRs can never capture the clinical experience?

Apocryphal story from residency: On morning rounds in the critical care unit, the post-call resident starts to present a complicated patient admitted overnight with chest pain, and after the first bits of the history have been presented, the wise old c…

The truth about artificial intelligence in medicine

For many months, artificial intelligence has been in my peripheral vision, just sitting there, ignored by me because it seemed too far in the future to be interesting now. And then, there were all these terms — Big Data, machine learning, data science …