Photo: z rahen via Flickr
This might not seem specific to social determinants of health, but machines that can be trained in health information may become gatekeepers of the future. If the artificial intelligence and medicine intersect successfully, the result could prove lifesaving for people whom social factors leave at a disadvantage. 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
Politico’s “The Agenda” section has published a special report on Medicare, now and in the future, and how it might fare in the current political climate. Baby boomers are weighing the system to the breaking point, and this series looks at the current threats and at the ideas being proposed to rescue the social welfare program for seniors. Continue reading
Photo: Dan Simpson via Flickr
Women and people of color are experiencing stubborn pay gaps in one of the more lucrative and in-demand fields of health care – health IT.
While the movement towards equal pay for equal work continues to grow, there is little data on compensation disparities in health IT, in part because the field is so new. Continue reading
You might be receiving a lot more PR pitches about artificial intelligence (AI) in your inbox these days. Gideon Gil, managing editor of Stat, has. Gil moderated a panel at Health Journalism 2018 on AI that aimed to help reporters and editors distinguish between hype and reality.
Briefly, AI is an artificial system that can perceive its environment and takes independent action to produce a result. AI products typically demonstrate behaviors associated with human intelligence such as learning, planning, movement and problem solving. Continue reading
Photo: Pia Christensen/AHCJMay Wang, chief technology officer at cybersecurity firm Zingbox, said that connected medical devices often are not used efficiently.
It’s only a matter of time before a patient is harmed through medical device hacking, and journalists have many resources to probe whether their local health providers are able to prevent or respond to such an event, said a panel of experts at Health Journalism 2018 in Phoenix.
To date, there are no documented cases of patients harmed by medical device hacking, said panel moderator and independent journalist Mark Taylor. But reporters should be asking their local hospitals about this specific cybersecurity threat. Continue reading