Bonus Features – March 17, 2024 – 65% of nurses think AI will negatively impact healthcare, 14% of EHRs have known cybersecurity vulnerabilities, plus 24 more stories
This article will be a weekly roundup of interesting stories, product announcements, new hires, partnerships, research studies, awards, sales, and more. Because there’s so much happening out there in healthcare IT we aren’t able to cover in our full articles, we still want to make sure you’re informed of all the latest news, announcements, and stories happening to help you better do your job.
News
CHIME provided some clarity on the Smart Hospital Maturity Model initiative, noting it’s meant to “complement and enhance” the existing Digital Health Most Wired Program. The organization also announced C...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - March 17, 2024 Category: Information Technology Authors: Brian Eastwood Tags: Healthcare IT Akasa Apixio Availity Avalon Healthcare Solutions CenTrak CharmHealth CHIME Christina Rassi Claim.MD Claroty ECRI Institute Encoda Epic Research Evry Health Healthcare IT Today Bonus Features HealtheLink HIM Source Type: blogs
Pharmaceutical profiteering
Another reason why we spend more on pharmaceuticals than the rest of the world ( " drugs " also means fentanyl and crank so I ' m trying to disambiguate here) is the profit motive. There are perverse incentives built into the system that encourage use of higher priced chemicals when cheaper ones would be as good or better for patients.There are some medications that people can ' t take at home. You have to go to a physician ' s office and have them infused. Medicare pays the physician a percentage of the cost of the drug, which means, obviously, that doctors make more money infusing a $10,000 drug than they would infusing ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 20, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Busting a myth
A common right wing trope is that illegal drugs are coming across the southern border, carried by illegal immigrants. You may even have seen the political ad featuring people climbing a wall wearing backpacks, implying that they were what are called " drug mules. " The whole thing was, of course, faked. I have written here before that this is not true, that is not how illicit drugs come into the country, butnow there is a very rigorous study proving it. Unfortunately, unless you have institutional access, you can only read the abstract, which is not very informative. (NBER used to be open access, this is apparently a new p...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 9, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
AI enforcement in health care: Unpacking the DEA ’ s approach to the opioid epidemic
In 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions became convinced that the opioid crisis was not the fault of cartels smuggling fentanyl across porous American checkpoints. And it wasn’t due to pharmaceutical companies corrupting drug approval officials and DEA administrators by hiring them as consultants after making decisions in the company’s favor. No. The opioid crisis was
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AI enforcement in health care: Unpacking the DEA’s approach to the opioid epidemic originally appeared in KevinMD.com. (Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog)
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - January 2, 2024 Category: General Medicine Authors: L. Joseph Parker, MD Tags: Meds Pain Management Source Type: blogs
What are nitazenes? Benzimidazole opioids
Benzimidazole opioids, also commonly known as nitazenes, were first synthesised by CIBA Pharmaceuticals in the 1950s as putative alternatives to morphine and heroin for use as strong painkillers. They have never made it into use in clinical medicine because the risk of addiction, respiratory depression, and death in use is too high.
Etonitazene has hundreds of times the potency of morphine
The compounds are classified as opioid New Psychoactive Substances (opioid NPS). Their mode of action is to bind to the brain’s mu-opioid receptors, but their unique structure means that some examples are several hundred times more...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - December 11, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Chemistry Health and Medicine Pharma Source Type: blogs
Are clinicians complicit in the Fentanyl epidemic?
I have a friend. He is non-medical, just a person who knows a lot of people. He grew up on the rough side of town. He has lost five friends or relatives this past year, he tells me. All to Fentanyl overdoses. Most were young, in their twenties or thirties. Two were friends of his
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Are clinicians complicit in the Fentanyl epidemic? originally appeared in KevinMD.com. (Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog)
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - November 19, 2023 Category: General Medicine Authors: Janet Tamaren, MD Tags: Meds Pain Management Source Type: blogs
A doctor ’ s thoughts on The Retrievals podcast
I recently listened to the podcast mini-series The Retrievals. It was fascinating and absolutely worth a listen. It’s the story of a Yale infertility clinic where a nurse was stealing fentanyl and replacing it with normal saline. As a result, women ended up getting egg retrievals with only midazolam, no pain control. There were interviews
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A doctor’s thoughts on The Retrievals podcast originally appeared in KevinMD.com. (Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog)
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - November 9, 2023 Category: General Medicine Authors: Valerie LeComte, DO Tags: Physician Medications Source Type: blogs
Just say no
I just finished reading Dopesick, by Beth Macy. You don ' t need to take my word that it ' s worth your while, the book was a huge bestseller. However, it does have a fairly narrow focus. It tells the story of the opioid epidemic largely within the confines of a region of rural Virginia, but this is a disaster of national scope that manifests somewhat differently in different places. Here ' s the really sad news: source:U.S. Department of Health and Human Services I know it ' s a little small but you can see it full size if you click the link. The short version of the story is that deaths from opioid ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - October 17, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Out of Control Health Costs or a Broken Society
Flawed Accounting for the US Health Spending Problem
By Jeff Goldsmith
Source: OECD, Our World in Data
Late last year, I saw this chart which made my heart sink. It compared US life expectancy to its health spending since 1970 vs. other countries. As you can see, the US began peeling off from the rest of the civilized world in the mid-1980’s. Then US life expectancy began falling around 2015, even as health spending continued to rise. We lost two more full years of life expectancy to COVID. By the end of 2022, the US had given up 26 years-worth of progress in life expecta...
Source: The Health Care Blog - October 9, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy COVID Drug Overdoses gun violence Hospitals Jeff Goldsmith Maternal mortality Mental Health Obesity Poverty Regional Economy Society Source Type: blogs
Out of Control Health Costs or a Broken Society
Flawed Accounting for the US Health Spending Problem
By Jeff Goldsmith
Source: OECD, Our World in Data
Late last year, I saw this chart which made my heart sink. It compared US life expectancy to its health spending since 1970 vs. other countries. As you can see, the US began peeling off from the rest of the civilized world in the mid-1980’s. Then US life expectancy began falling around 2015, even as health spending continued to rise. We lost two more full years of life expectancy to COVID. By the end of 2022, the US had given up 26 years-worth of progress in life expectancy gains. Adding four more ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - October 9, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy COVID Drug Overdoses gun violence Hospitals Jeff Goldsmith Maternal mortality Mental Health Obesity Poverty Regional Economy Society Source Type: blogs
Levamisole is good for your dog, but bad for your cocaine
In recent years, public attention has been focused on the presence of Fentanyl-laced cocaine. It has overshadowed another new threat just as heinous yet relatively unknown – that of levamisole. Since the turn of the century, the use of levamisole has grown as a “filler” to cut or increase the amount of cocaine sold. Other
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Levamisole is good for your dog, but bad for your cocaine originally appeared in KevinMD.com. (Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog)
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - September 25, 2023 Category: General Medicine Authors: Robert Killeen, MD Tags: Meds Psychiatry Source Type: blogs
A comic reveals the terrifying truth about fentanyl
The fentanyl crisis represents a grave and lethal epidemic, marked by the illicit consumption of powerful synthetic opioids, resulting in a staggering increase in fatal overdose cases. Physician Emily Watters offers her unique insights on this critical issue through a captivating comic format (click to enlarge): Emily Watters is a psychiatrist and can be reached
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A comic reveals the terrifying truth about fentanyl originally appeared in KevinMD.com. (Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog)
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - July 27, 2023 Category: General Medicine Authors: Emily Watters, MD Tags: Meds Psychiatry Source Type: blogs
Profound ST depression in II, III, aVF
Conclusion:Type II MI probable due to hypoxia and tachycardia from resp arrest and amphetamine use. Whether the ST Depression on the ECG represents ischemia or not is uncertain, but it does not represent acute coronary syndrome.===================================MY Comment, by KEN GRAUER, MD (7/26/2023):===================================The most interesting aspects of today ’s case are: i) The tale told by the 6 ECGs; and, ii) The surprise finding of positive troponins! The Sum is More than Each of its Parts:If we look back at the initial ECG&nb...
Source: Dr. Smith's ECG Blog - July 27, 2023 Category: Cardiology Authors: Steve Smith Source Type: blogs
What ’ s Something Not Enough People are Talking About in Healthcare?
The world of healthcare is already so huge and yet it keeps expanding. Every day we see new faces trying to make a name for themselves with new ideas or new takes on old ideas. Technology continues to advance, allowing us to finally accomplish things we had previously only dreamed of. And we continue to grow and learn and fight to be more inclusive in our practices. But with so much out there to work on and talk about, it’s easy for some topics to get lost in the weeds.
In order to help remedy this, we gathered a bunch of the most amazing health IT experts to get their insights on what isn’t being talked about ...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - July 7, 2023 Category: Information Technology Authors: Grayson Miller Tags: AI/Machine Learning Ambulatory C-Suite Leadership Health IT Company Healthcare IT Hospital - Health System Interoperability IT Infrastructure and Dev Ops Regulations Amwell Andrew Meadow Avel eCare Bandwidth Caitlin Long Caroly Source Type: blogs
More Evidence That Opioid Policymakers Keep Aiming at the Wrong Target
Jeffrey A. SingerA new study released earlier this year adds more evidence to the mountains of evidence that policymakers trying to solve the overdose crisis have been aiming at the wrong target.Researchers from the Dartmouth University School of Medicine recently published in theAnnals of Surgery the results of a prospective clinical trial of 221 opioid naïve surgical patients prescribed opioids at discharge and followed for one year after surgery. Eighty‐eight percent of the patients had cancer‐related operations. Their surgeons prescribed opioids for pain control when they discharged them home from the hosp...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - May 30, 2023 Category: American Health Authors: Jeffrey A. Singer Source Type: blogs
