By MIKE MAGEE In his book, “The Age of Diminished Expectations” (MIT Press/1994), Nobel Prize winner, Paul Krugman, famously wrote, “Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything.” A year earlier, psychologist Karl E. Weich from the University of Michigan penned the term “sensemaking” based on his belief that the human mind was in fact the engine of productivity, and functioned like a biological computer which “receives input, processes the information, and delivers an output.” But comparing the human brain to a computer was not exactly a compl ..read more

By KIM BELLARD The most interesting story I read in the past week doesn’t come from the more usual worlds of health and/or technology, but from sports. It’s not even really news, since it was announced last fall; it’s just that it wasn’t until last week that a U.S. publication (The New York Times) reported on it. In a nutshell, a Paris football (a.k.a. soccer) club is not charging its fans admission during the current season. Since last week I wrote about medical debt in the U.S. healthcare system, you might guess where this is going. The club is Paris FC. Last November it announced: For the ..read more

Tim O’Connell discusses emtelligent’s capability to take unstructured clinical data and using NLP, match it to clinical ontologies and figure out what disease patients have, and enable payers and providers to do something about it–rather than payment coding which is what NLP has usually been used for. I spoke to him at HIMSS in March where he was launching emtelligent own new large language model (LLM). Anyone with a health data set is a potential client, but Tim thinks we can use all this data and his company’s technology to radically improve our understanding of clinical care, and improve it ..read more

By KIM BELLARD Among the many things that infuriate me about the U.S. healthcare system, health systems sending their patients to collections – or even suing them – is pretty high on the list (especially when they are “non-profit” and./or faith-based organizations, which we should expect to behave better). There’s no doubt medical debt in the U.S. is a huge problem. Studies have found that more than 100 million people have medical debt, many of whom don’t think they’ll ever be able to pay it off. Kaiser Family Foundation estimates Americans owe some $220b in medical debt, with 3 million peopl ..read more

Medicomp provides a medical database within an EMR and which delivers all the diagnoses and other information directly to the clinician. It represents the note to the physician as a SMART on FHIR app so that they can quickly find the information they need within their workflow. I had a quick catch up with CEO Dave Lareau, and asked him not only what Medicomp does but how all that generative AI has started to change this. He thinks that the output of LLMs and ambient AI will actually make a greater demand for their tools–from a company that’s coming up on its 50th birthday! (Well 46th….)–Matthe ..read more

By KELLY CARROLL There is a dire need to raise awareness about heart disease in women. It is the number one killer of American women, and key data points reveal a lack of cognizance among doctors and women. An assessment of primary care physicians published in 2019 revealed that only 22% felt extremely well prepared to evaluate cardiovascular disease risks in female patients. A 2019 survey of American women showed that just 44% recognized heart disease as the number one cause of death in women. Ten years earlier, in 2009, the same survey found that 65% of American women recognized heart disea ..read more

By MIKE MAGEE How comfortable is the FDA and Medical Ethics community with a new super-charged medical Facial Recognition Technology (mFRT) that claims it can “identify the early stages of autism in infants as young as 12 months?” That test already has a name -the RightEye GeoPref Autism Test. Its’ UC San Diego designer says it was 86% accurate in testing 400 infants and toddlers. Or how about Face2Gene which claims its’ mFRT tool already has linked half of the known human genetic syndromes to “facial patterns?” Or how about employers using mFRT facial and speech patterns to identify employee ..read more

By JEFF GOLDSMITH Years ago, the largest living thing in the world was thought to be the blue whale. Then someone discovered that the largest living thing in the world was actually the 106 acre, 47 thousand tree Pando aspen grove in central Utah, which genetic testing revealed to be a single organism. With its enormous network of underground roots and symbiotic relationship with a vast ecosystem of fungi, that aspen grove is a great metaphor for UnitedHealth Group. United, whose revenues amount to more than 8% of the US health system, is the largest healthcare enterprise in the worl ..read more

Bevey Miner runs health care for Consensus Cloud Solutions. I’ve known Bevey since she was at Allscripts in the 2000s where she was one of the first building online prescribing. She’s been at lots of places and is now at Consensus which is taking unstructured data via cloud fax and assessing it, structuring it and delivering it–especially to places like skilled nursing facilities. Bevey calls that data at the “outer circles” and we were talking at a time when a lot of electronic communication was down because of the Change Healthcare hack when a lot of it wasn’t flowing. Bevey tells us about w ..read more

By STEVEN ZECOLA This study tracks the decades-long journey to harness alpha-synuclein as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease. Steven Zecola an activist who tracks Parkinson’s research and was on THCB last month discussing it, offers three key changes needed to overcome the underlying challenges. A Quick Start for Alpha-Synuclein R&D In the mid-1990’s, Parkinson’s patient advocacy groups had become impatient by the absence of any major therapeutic advances in the 25 years since L-dopa had been approved for Parkinson’s disease (PD). The Director of National Institute of Neurological Disord ..read more