Practical Medical Ethics: Rationing Responsibly in an Age of Austerity
Join me for "Practical Medical Ethics: Rationing Responsibly in an Age of Austerity," two weeks from today, on Wednesday, June 20th, 2018, at Ship Street Centre, Jesus College, Oxford.
Health professionals face ever expanding possibilities for medical treatment, increasing patient expectations and at the same time intense pressures to reduce healthcare costs. This leads frequently to conflicts between obligations to current patients, and others who might benefit from treatment.
Is it ethical for doctors and other health professionals to engage in bedside rationing? What ethical principles should guide decisions (for exampl...
Source: blog.bioethics.net - June 6, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Thaddeus Mason Pope, JD, PhD Tags: Health Care syndicated Source Type: blogs
5 Reasons Why Artificial Intelligence Won ’t Replace Physicians
Hype and fears surround artificial intelligence taking jobs in healthcare. Will it render physicians obsolete? Will it replace the majority of medical professionals? The Medical Futurist decided to set things straight. Here are five fundamental reasons why A.I. won’t replace doctors and never will.
The medical community should not fall for the fearmongering around A.I.
At the dawn of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, automation and digitization are turning the job market upside down. Many fear that robots, A.I., and automation, in general, will take their jobs without alternatives. The same anxieties emerged in healthcar...
Source: The Medical Futurist - May 24, 2018 Category: Information Technology Authors: nora Tags: Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Future of Medicine AI digital health insurance doctor Healthcare job job market physician technology Source Type: blogs
SmokeBeat Uses Fitness Bands and Smartwatches to Detect Smoking: Interview with CEO of Somatix
The tobacco epidemic is one of the biggest public health issues in history. There are more than one billion smokers worldwide and smoking kills more than seven million people annually. Although many smokers recognize how deadly their habit can be and express the desire to stop smoking, quitting remains very difficult. To help smokers kick their habit once and for all, Somatix, an Israeli company, developed SmokeBeat.
SmokeBeat is an innovative smoking cessation tool that uses an individual’s personal smartwatch or smartband to detect smoking by tracking the user’s hand-to-mouth gestures. SmokeBeat is unique in that it ...
Source: Medgadget - May 7, 2018 Category: Medical Devices Authors: Kenan Raddawi Tags: Exclusive Medicine Psychiatry Rehab Source Type: blogs
Seeing Value From the Patient ’s Perspective
By TIMOTHY HOFF
“Value” is the focus right now in American health care. Payers like Medicare and private insurers are placing great emphasis on it, as are hospitals and doctors’ offices needing to satisfy the demands of those payers to get paid. But the focus on value in the present system is centered on reforming payment and lowering costs almost exclusively, rather than enhancing the patient experience, and involves unproven approaches like “bundled payment” and “pay for performance”, in which doctors and hospitals are financially incented to fixate on efficiency in how they deliver care. In short, right no...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 30, 2018 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs
Tropical Travel Trouble 007 Mega Malaria Extravaganza
LITFL • Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog LITFL • Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog - Emergency medicine and critical care medical education blog
aka Tropical Travel Trouble 007
When you think tropical medicine, malaria has to be near the top. It can be fairly complex and fortunately treatment has become a lot simpler. This post is designed to walk you through the basic principals with links to more in depth teaching if your niche is travel medicine, laboratory diagnostics or management of severe or cerebral malaria. If you stubbled on this post while drinking a cup of tea or sitting on the throne and want a few basi...
Source: Life in the Fast Lane - April 5, 2018 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Neil Long Tags: Clinical Cases Tropical Medicine malaria Plasmodium plasmodium falciparum plasmodium knowles plasmodium malariae plasmodium ovale plasmodium vivax Source Type: blogs
Tropical Travel Trouble 006 Watery Diarrhoea
LITFL • Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog LITFL • Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog - Emergency medicine and critical care medical education blog
aka Tropical Travel Trouble 006
Our medical student who caught shigella on a Nepalese elective has a thirst for adventure. They plan to help at a Bangladesh refugee camp but the latest CDC report states there have been some cases of cholera. They’ve done a little bit of reading and want your help to teach them all about cholera and how they may prepare and best serve their new community.
Questions:
Q1. What is cholera and how is it transmitted?
Answer and interpreta...
Source: Life in the Fast Lane - March 27, 2018 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Neil Long Tags: Clinical Cases Tropical Medicine cholera diarrhoea john snow ORS rice water diarrhoea watery diarrhoea Source Type: blogs
Interview with Ori Geva, CEO of Medial EarlySign: A Healthcare Data Analytics Startup
Predictive analytics is the practice of learning from historical data in contemplation of making decisions about the future. Predictive analytics is not new to healthcare. However, in the past it has been limited by many factors, including data availability and accessibility. Over the last few years, the issue of data availability has been rectified, mainly due to the widespread implementation of electronic health records (EHRs) and the growth of patient generated data. But in order to leverage this data, we still need to analyze it and reach actionable insights. Here is where healthcare data analytics companies come in.
E...
Source: Medgadget - March 22, 2018 Category: Medical Devices Authors: Kenan Raddawi Tags: Exclusive Informatics Medicine Public Health Source Type: blogs
Medical Ethics Symposium on Health Care Rationing – Oxford June 20, 2018
Join me at Jesus College, University of Oxford on June 20, for "Practical Medical Ethics: Rationing Responsibly in an Age of Austerity."
Health professionals face ever expanding possibilities for medical treatment, increasing patient expectations and at the same time intense pressures to reduce healthcare costs. This leads frequently to conflicts between obligations to current patients, and others who might benefit from treatment.
Is it ethical for doctors and other health professionals to engage in bedside rationing? What ethical principles should guide decisions (for example about which patients to offer intensive ...
Source: blog.bioethics.net - March 17, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Thaddeus Mason Pope, JD, PhD Tags: Health Care syndicated Source Type: blogs
Tropical Travel Trouble 004 Bloody Diarrhoea
LITFL • Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog LITFL • Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog - Emergency medicine and critical care medical education blog
aka Tropical Travel Trouble 004
A medical student who has just returned from their elective in Nepal presents with 1 week of bloody diarrhoea. He has been in the lowlands and stayed with a family in the local village he was helping at. It started three days before he left and he decided to get home on the plane in the hope it would settle. He is now opening his bowels 10x a day with associated cramps, fevers and has started feeling dizzy.
Questions:
Q1. What is dysentery ...
Source: Life in the Fast Lane - March 12, 2018 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Neil Long Tags: Clinical Cases Tropical Medicine amoebic dysentery bacillary dysentery e.histolytica entamoeba histolytica shigellosis Source Type: blogs
Tropical Travel Trouble 003 Stiff in the Mouth
LITFL • Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog
LITFL • Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog - Emergency medicine and critical care medical education blog
aka Tropical Travel Trouble 003
A 65 yr old woman from Ethiopia is visiting her grandchild for the first time in Europe. She is normally fit and well, physically active with a small-holding in Ethiopia. She does not take any medication and cannot remember the last time she saw a doctor. She presents to you with difficulty chewing 3 days after arriving in the UK. She describes it as being “stiff in the mouth”
Questions:
Q1. What is the differential diagnosis an...
Source: Life in the Fast Lane - March 5, 2018 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Neil Long Tags: Clinical Cases Tropical Medicine tetanus Source Type: blogs
Tropical Travel Trouble 002 Rabies
LITFL • Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog
LITFL • Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog - Emergency medicine and critical care medical education blog
aka Tropical Travel Trouble 002
A 19 year old gap year student has returned from India to your emergency department reporting she was bitten by a monkey at a temple. A selfie gone wrong but it scored 1000+ likes on Facebook…
She is concerned because one of the Facebook comments suggested she may have rabies! A quick Google search suggested 60,000 people a year DIE from rabies.
Should she be worried? Should you be worried?
Questions
Q1. What other questions should yo...
Source: Life in the Fast Lane - February 27, 2018 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Neil Long Tags: Clinical Cases Tropical Medicine rabies Source Type: blogs
Liquid-Powered Bioprinting of Tissues at Any Scale
Researchers at Queen Mary University of London, University of Oxford, and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, have developed an unusual way to print complex biological structures with multiple ingredients that can harness further tissue growth. The 3D structures that are created are made of modular components that can be brought together in specific concentrations and locations.
The technique is actually self-assembling, using liquid currents to bring things together. Computers are certainly used to predict how droplets come together and form shapes. The result is precision control at different scales while ke...
Source: Medgadget - February 26, 2018 Category: Medical Devices Authors: Editors Tags: Genetics Materials Source Type: blogs
Stayin' Alive
Last Sunday I showed you all those characters in Genesis who lived 900 years, and I noted that is about 20 times what folks could actually expect back then. The story is a bit more complicated than that.Here ' s a useful resource from Oxford University about historic life expectancy. (You might enjoy exploring the site which has all sorts of other information about humans and the planet.) This only goes back to about 1850, when reasonably complete records are available, but in fact the story in 1750 was not markedly different than it was in 1750 BC.Life expectancy at birth, historically, has been around 37 year or so. Howe...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 2, 2018 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Bigger is Not Always Better: How Consolidation in Health Care Hurts Patients
By TIMOTHY HOFF
The recent news that U.S. retail giant CVS Health will purchase insurance giant Aetna, in part to gain millions of new customers for its prescription drug and primary care businesses, is another ominous sign for patients. Patients should worry about all the continued consolidation in the health care industry, whether it is Walgreens buying Rite-Aid to increase their pharmacy clout; Anthem’s ill-fated attempt to purchase Cigna to become an insurance monopoly; or hospital systems like Partners Healthcare in Boston trying to buy the hospitals and physician networks in and around its service area to control...
Source: The Health Care Blog - January 30, 2018 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: Uncategorized Aetna Consolidation CVS Health value-based care Source Type: blogs
