Photo: Elliot Margolies via Flickr
Health Affairs held an October event in Sacramento on California’s health policy landscape (also available as a podcast).
Here are some highlights from the panelists, all of whom are excellent potential sources for stories about health care policy in California and around the nation: Continue reading
Robert Wachter
, M.D., chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, is considered the “father” of the hospitalist field and a leader in the patient safety field. He’s written six books, including “The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age,” which took a detailed look at the role of technology in health care. (We covered his 2015 talk to AHCJ-New York chapter members in this article).
Wachter was a keynote speaker at the recent Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine Conference in New Orleans – where he talked about medicine’s digital transformation and the upsides and the downsides that accompany progress. He sat with me for a brief interview prior to his presentation. Continue reading
Photo: Matthew Hadley via Flickr
Every nine minutes, someone in a U.S. hospital dies due to a medical diagnosis that was wrong or delayed. This jarring fact is front and center on the home page of the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine (SIDM). Reducing this number to zero is why some 400 physicians, nurses, patients, health institutions, nonprofits, and policymakers gathered in New Orleans this week for the 11th annual Diagnostic Error in Medicine Annual International Conference. Continue reading
The Center for Excellence in Health Care Journalism, the educational arm of the Association of Health Care Journalists, has been awarded a grant of more than half a million dollars to strengthen the knowledge and skills of health care journalists.
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation made the three-year grant of $509,400 to the Missouri-based center to assist in educating journalists in building their knowledge base in several areas.
Along with continuing the foundation’s support of a web-based core curriculum on health information technology, the grant will support a new curriculum on patient safety, curated resources for freelance journalists and an endowing sponsorship of the annual conference of AHCJ.
It seems obvious that for physicians to deliver the best care they should have accurate records on each patient’s medical history, including diagnoses, lab results, imaging, medications, surgeries, etc.
But linking electronic patient medical records across institutions and time – called interoperability – requires something that no one seems to have figured out how to do on a large scale: patient matching. Continue reading
Photo: Roger Mommaerts via Flickr
Hospitals and health systems are jumping into artificial intelligence (AI) in an effort to help physicians better analyze images and other clinical data. But reporters should be careful about overstating the value that these new tools can bring to clinical decision-making.
Radiology is the medical specialty probably most associated with AI today because of the tantalizing possibility that computers could help radiologists read images more quickly, enabling earlier diagnoses and treatment.