July was an interesting month for artificial intelligence in medicine. A study from MIT found when human doctors order tests on patients, they factor in something that artificial intelligence is not currently aware of. The authors analyzed charts of about 60,000 ICU patients admitted to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. By looking at […]
The trouble began when I needed to open the electronic health record (EHR) system for the tenth time that day. EHRs have significantly changed the way we practice medicine. They have completely eliminated the need for storage and transport of paper charts, reduced prescription errors secondary to illegible handwritings of physicians and provided an excellent […]
A guest column by the American College of Physicians, exclusive to KevinMD.com. I recently saw a new patient who came to our practice following a lengthy hospitalization. He is in his 80s with a fairly complex medical history typical of many in this age range. Yet, after carefully sifting through my first introduction to this […]
Technology can be both a blessing and a curse and nowhere is this more painfully evident than in the U.S. health care system. If technology is to be used to improve the patient-doctor relationship, its systems should be designed by physicians who understand these needs, not by regulators and health care conglomerates for whom business […]
How smart do we want our electronic health record to be? Somewhere between as dumb as a piece of paper and a pen, and too smart for our own good. Many, many years ago, before we spent the majority of our office visit staring at a flatscreen LED and typing away, our charts were simple […]
A few months ago, I was on call and admitted a 65-year-old man to the intensive care unit for a flare of his chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Although he had only gotten to the point of being unable to speak full sentences between gasps for breath for only a few days, his story started […]
Drivers are distracted klutzes and computers could obviously do better. Self-driving cars will make all of us safer on he road. Doctors have spotty knowledge and keep illegible records. EMRs with decision support will improve the quality of healthcare. The parallels are obvious. And so far the outcomes are disappointing on both fronts of our […]
Attend any biotech or health informatics conference and one thing becomes clear: the scarcity of physicians. Entrepreneurs, businessmen, angel investors, and software engineers swarm these conferences — and their encompassing companies — all the while the imperative persona in this realm remains tied up behind a dysfunctional EHR or in an overbooked operating room. Why? […]
Attend any biotech or health informatics conference and one thing becomes clear: the scarcity of physicians. Entrepreneurs, businessmen, angel investors, and software engineers swarm these conferences — and their encompassing companies — all the while the imperative persona in this realm remains tied up behind a dysfunctional EHR or in an overbooked operating room. Why? […]
“There’s an app for that.” The phrase became so popular with the advent of smartphones that Apple even trademarked it. There are currently 3.8 million apps available on Android devices and over 2 million available to Apple iPhone users. Does that mean that we’ve reached a limit on new and useful apps that can be […]
