I have never had another person in the exam room with my doctor and me during a physician visit after childhood. With the introduction of electronic medical records many people complained there was hardly even a doctor in the room listening to them. Health insurers, and public health advocates, all want a ton of documentation from each physician visit. Increasingly there is another party eavesdropping on your doctor’s visit. An artificial intelligence (AI) interface passively recording and processing the visit discussion and turning the conversation into a coherent medical record.
Category: Direct Primary Care
AI Can Reduce Medication Errors
Medical errors and medical failures do not often result from simple mistakes. Most are the result of a series of failures that lead to serious errors. By the way, the same is true of plane crashes. A simple technical fix is unlikely to solve the problem of incorrect medication errors. A comprehensive system of risk analysis from the pharmacy to the hospital floor or operating room will be necessary to eliminate medication errors.
Friday Links
- The plan that is now being debated in the House has net spending reductions of roughly $1.2 trillion. Instead of spending $89.3 trillion, the “cruel” Republicans want to only spend $88.1 trillion – a measly 1.5% cut.
- “Our research finds that the growing presence of asylum seekers [illegal immigrants] residing in homeless shelters explains about 60 percent of this rise in sheltered homelessness.”
- “The Trump administration handed Medicare Advantage plans a massive gift on Monday, finalizing payment rates for 2026 significantly higher than what regulators in the Biden administration sketched out.”
- An “intelligent” hospital room allows for virtual nursing.
- Antarctica’s massive ice sheet is growing, not shrinking.
NYT: Preventive Care Under Attack at Supreme Court
Whether or not it is a good idea to mandate preventive service is a worthy debate. The problem with mandates is that without hospitals and health plans competing on the basis of price, quality and other amenities, the services are likely to become worthless.