- What a hospital in the home is like at Mayo. Note: this is only possible because of Covid relaxation of normal Medicare and Medicaid rules.
- A proposal for value-based drug pricing. I am skeptical
- AI is learning how to read your mind. MRI scans reveal unexpressed thoughts.
- Private industry developed a nonaddictive painkiller. The FDA is why it isn’t widely available. (WSJ)
Category: Doctors & Hospitals
AI Chatbot Judged More Empathetic than Physicians
The human language artificial intelligence ‘chatbot’ ChatGPT scored higher on empathy than its human counterparts in a recent study of medical questions and answers. When compared to human doctors the AI chatbots answers were preferred 80% of the time. The study appeared in JAMA Internal Medicine. The study used questions from Reddit’s AskDocs social media forum. One possible weakness about…
Tuesday Links
- George Halvorson: “The death rate for many dual eligible patients [in traditional Medicare] with some conditions runs at about 40 percent, and we know from a year-long study … that the death rate for the people who enrolled in the Medicare Advantage [special needs plans] was 3 percent.”
- More from Halvorson on fee-for-service Medicare: “the program has 10,000 billing codes for procedures and not one billing code for a cure.”
- Survey: More than 25% of pilots admitted to being untruthful on medical forms — and nearly half turned to nonprofessionals for medical advice versus seeing a doctor.
- Under the public health emergency, employers can offer stand-alone telehealth benefits to benefits-ineligible employees like part-time or seasonal workers. Hard to believe employers need the government’s permission to do this.
Dental Therapists are Key to Dental Care in Underserved Areas
I’m seeing my dentist tomorrow for a cleaning. I go two or three times a year. Last year I even wrote about going to Costa Rica for a dental visit to have an implant finished. While I was there, I had some aging veneers that were deteriorating replaced with crowns. I see my dentist far more than I see my primary care physician. Whereas I can have lab tests performed even if I don’t see my physician, the same is not true of dental visits. Dental visits are hands-on. There are no substitutes for dental examinations or dental hygienist cleanings. Yet, many people neglect dental care due to the cost, often made less convenient by a lack of dentists in their immediate area.