Why you’re more likely to see a physician assistant than a doctor

Dr. Aziz Nazha, the oncologist in charge of the Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Clinical Artificial Intelligence, has a controversial opinion about what kind of training the next generation of doctors should undergo. “Physicians of the future should know how to program,” he said, “but I know I won’t win that battle.”

The fact that there are even discussions about whether coding should be a requirement of medical school is just one of the many changes at hand for the millions of clinicians who make up the U.S. health care workforce.

Not only are there predicted shortages of nurses and physicians that are expected to worsen over the next decade, industry attempts to shift from a fee-for-service reimbursement model to a value-based system have called for more efficient clinicians and better care for patients.

At the same time, hospitals are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence tools like chatbots and digital scribes and machine-learning models that aim to predict readmission rates and examine mammograms for breast cancer. (Even the tech giants are starting to dabble in health care. Apple Inc. is trying to improve nursing workflow, while Alphabet Inc.’s Google is testing whether digital voice assistants can reduce the amount of time doctors spend entering patient information into the electronic health record.)

All of these trends are influencing how care is delivered and by what kind of clinician. In the exam room of the future — which may be your living room — the doctor may ask about your feelings or know how to code, a physician assistant may be virtual or human, and a nurse may be assisted by a robot.

The full MarketWatch article can be viewed at this link.  

Trump signs $8.3B emergency coronavirus package

President Donald Trump today signed the $8.3 billion emergency funding package Congress swiftly cleared, triggering the flow of cash to federal agencies and states working to combat a rising number of COVID-19 cases in the U.S.

The bill provides a total of $7.7 billion in new discretionary spending and authorizes an additional $490 million in mandatory spending through a Medicare change.

The full Politico article can be viewed at this link.  

AI was supposed to save health care. What if it makes it more expensive?

Last year, Mount Sinai Hospital switched on an artificial intelligence program to search the hospital’s records for evidence of malnourished patients in its wards. The numbers it turned up were eye-popping: 20 percent more cases were diagnosed than in the previous year.

Around the same time, Barbara Murphy, chief of the renowned health system’s department of medicine, was helping to develop another AI program, to predict whether diabetic patients are at near-term risk of kidney disease and to help prioritize specialist visits for those who are. One of the early findings, according to Murphy: “We probably need some more nephrologists.”

As hospital systems around the country unleash machine learning algorithms — computer models that function like millions of unblinking eyes inspecting patient records — such findings are becoming more common. The algorithms, deployed in hospitals over the past couple of years, are often designed to help locate the sickest patients, but in some cases, they also provide more opportunities to bill.

The full Politico article can be viewed at this link.  

Coronavirus could be a boon for telemedicine, as health industry hopes to keep ‘worried well’ out of the hospital

As the COVID-19 cases continue to spread across the U.S., hospitals and insurance companies are expecting a swell in visitors to clinics and emergency rooms.

But the crisis could provide a bright spot for one sector of the health industry that has struggled to gain widespread acceptance: Telemedicine.

Virtual services, like online symptom-checking tools and remote consults with doctors, could keep the so-called “worried well” from flooding hospitals. If the healthiest people don’t show up in emergency rooms, that could mean that more resources are available to treat the sickest and most vulnerable patients. 

The full CNBC article can be viewed at this link.  

Telehealth Beyond The Hospital

The industry of telehealth is expanding for many reasons, including increased access to technology, a demand for more affordable health services and the desire for convenient care. Research findings projected a compound annual growth rate between 2014 and 2020 of 18.4% for telehealth services.

Telehealth can reduce initial hospital admissions, readmissions, length of stay and mortality rates. By expanding telehealth services to the outpatient industry, emergency department visits are reduced, patient engagement and health management are encouraged, and the overall cost of chronic disease management is lowered.

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.  

Insurers promise to cover coronavirus tests, relax coverage policies

A major health insurance trade group is pledging its member plans will cover doctor-ordered testing for the coronavirus amid rising confusion and concern about who will bear the cost of care in an outbreak.

America’s Health Insurance Plans made the commitment Thursday, although it's still unclear when insurers might have to start paying for tests. So far, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has picked up the tab for COVID-19 testing. The cost picture is expected to become more complicated as more private labs and academic medical centers launch their own testing. Thursday alone, commercial labs Quest Diagnostics, LabCorp and BioReference Laboratories announced they'd launch testing for the virus.

The full Politico article can be viewed at this link.  

Six Healthcare Trends To Watch For 2020

As we begin the new decade, I'd like to talk about six major healthcare industry trends that I'm most excited about in 2020.

1. AI-Powered Tools To Increase Efficiency
2. Using The Cloud To Break Down Silos And Move Data Faster
3. Ensuring Patient Consent In The Big Data Era
4. Virtual Solutions For Busy Medical Professionals
5. Demystifying Healthcare Data For Patients
6. Home-Based Healthcare

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.  

Precision medicine: course correction urgently needed

An undeclared civil war is breaking out in biomedicine. On one side is precision medicine, with its emphasis on tailoring treatments to ever-narrower groups of patients. On the other side is population health, which emphasizes predominantly preventive interventions that have broad applications across populations.

Which vision will provide the most durable and efficient path to improved health for all?

Precision medicine is a merger of molecular genetics, the dominant vision in biology, and genomics, the expression of that vision in human health. Disregarding the “breakthrough” announcements that appear on a regular basis, the question of whether precision medicine will lead to better health for all remains an open one.

The full STAT article can be viewed at this link.  

'Fixing health care' is a disservice to society

We all know — and the presidential candidates keep reminding us at every debate and in the run-up to Super Tuesday — that our health care system is struggling to provide Americans with affordable care. While we broadly agree that health care needs to be fixed, the conversation on “how” is headed down the wrong path. Instead of looking for solutions to patch up the current system, we should think anew for higher efficiencies, lower costs and, most importantly, better outcomes.  

We should start by asking how we use existing and emerging technologies to invent a preventive, proactive, predictive, and personalized self-care system that delivers tenfold cost-effectiveness enhancements. How do we seize the new economics of a tech-enabled national health care system? Many of the tools needed to affect this transformation are now available; others are rapidly evolving. Health care policymakers need to focus on cultivating and rapidly incorporating a new tech-enabled paradigm of health management while phasing out the old.  

The full opinion piece from The Hill can be viewed at this link.  

FHIR Fever Is Catching On In Healthcare

It's been almost two decades since the nonprofit Health Level Seven International (HL7) created the FHIR standard, now on its fourth release. The forces of government regulation, consumer demand, competition and the journey to value-based care are creating new pressure on the healthcare industry to embrace interoperability, a Deloitte report says, with FHIR emerging as the common language. Open standards to link diagnostic, clinical health and certain administrative data can reduce medical errors, eliminate opportunities for fraud and bring down the data siloes that account for so much waste.

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.