Tag: Doctors

ChatGPT Won’t Fix Healthcare, But It Might Save Doctors Some Time

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In a healthcare industry still burdened with 1960s technology, generative AI may offer a little relief — but companies are still working to overhaul a broken system that’s keeping doctors and nurses more focused on paperwork than patients.

By Katie Jennings and Rashi Shrivastava, Forbes Staff

Every week, Eli Gelfand, chief of general cardiology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, wastes a lot of time on letters he doesn’t want to write — all of them to insurers disputing his recommendations. A new drug for a heart failure patient. A CAT scan for a patient with chest pain. A new drug for a patient with stiff heart syndrome. “We’re talking about appeal letters for things that are life-saving,” says Gelfand, who is also an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.

So when OpenAI’s ChatGPT began making headlines for generally coherent artificial intelligence-generated text, Gelfand saw an opportunity to save some time. He fed the bot some basic information about a diagnosis and the medications he’d prescribed (leaving out the patient’s name) and asked it to write an appeal letter with references to scientific papers.

ChatGPT gave him a viable letter — the first of many. And while the references may sometimes be wrong, Gelfand told Forbes the letters require “minimal editing.” Crucially, they have cut the time he spends writing them down to a minute on average. And they work.

Gelfand has used ChatGPT for some 30 appeal letters, most of which have been approved by insurers, he says. But he’s under no illusion that ChatGPT or the AI that powers it is going to save the U.S. healthcare system anytime soon. “It’s basically making my life a little easier and hopefully getting the patients the medications they need at a higher rate,” Gelfand says. “This is a workaround solution for a problem that shouldn’t really exist.”

That problem: The U.S. spends more money on healthcare administration than any other country. In 2019, around a quarter of the $3.8 trillion spent on healthcare went to administrative issues like the ones bemoaned by Gelfand. It’s estimated around $265 billion of that was “wasteful” — unnecessary expenditures necessitated by the antiquated technology that undergirds the U.S. healthcare system. Gelfand can use a chatbot to electronically generate an appeal letter. But he has to fax it to the insurer. And that encapsulates the challenge facing companies hoping to build time-saving AI back-office tools for a healthcare system stuck in the 1960s.

Cut The “Scut”

The fax machine isn’t going away anytime soon, says Nate Gross, cofounder and chief strategy officer of Doximity, a San Francisco-based social networking platform used by two million doctors and other healthcare professionals in the U.S. That’s why Doximity’s new workflow tool, DocsGPT, a chatbot that helps doctors write a wide range of letters and certificates, is connected to its online faxing tool.

“Our design thesis is to make it as easy as possible for doctors to interface with

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How Americans View Use of AI in Health Care and Medicine by Doctors and Other Providers

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Yet many see promise for artificial intelligence to help issues of bias in medical care

Pew Research Center conducted this study to understand Americans’ views of artificial intelligence (AI) and its uses in health and medicine. For this analysis, we surveyed 11,004 U.S. adults from Dec. 12-18, 2022.

Everyone who took part in the survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way, nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology.

Here are the questions used for this report, along with responses, and its methodology.

This is part of a series of surveys and reports that look at the increasing role of AI in shaping American life. For more, read “Public Awareness of Artificial Intelligence in Everyday Activities” and “How Americans view emerging uses of artificial intelligence, including programs to generate text or art.”

A new Pew Research Center survey explores public views on artificial intelligence (AI) in health and medicine – an area where Americans may increasingly encounter technologies that do things like screen for skin cancer and even monitor a patient’s vital signs.

The survey finds that on a personal level, there’s significant discomfort among Americans with the idea of AI being used in their own health care. Six-in-ten U.S. adults say they would feel uncomfortable if their own health care provider relied on artificial intelligence to do things like diagnose disease and recommend treatments; a significantly smaller share (39%) say they would feel comfortable with this.

One factor in these views: A majority of the public is unconvinced that the use of AI in health and medicine would improve health outcomes. The Pew Research Center survey, conducted Dec. 12-18, 2022, of 11,004 U.S. adults finds only 38% say AI being used to do things like diagnose disease and recommend treatments would lead to better health outcomes for patients generally, while 33% say it would lead to worse outcomes and 27% say it wouldn’t make much difference.

These findings come as public attitudes toward AI continue to take shape, amid the ongoing adoption of AI technologies across industries and the accompanying national conversation about the benefits and risks that AI applications present for society. Read recent Center analyses for more on public awareness of AI in daily life and perceptions of how much advancement emerging AI applications represent for their fields.

Asked in more detail about how the use of artificial intelligence would impact health and medicine, Americans identify a mix of both positives and negatives.

On the positive side, a larger share of Americans think the use of AI in health and medicine would reduce rather than increase the number of mistakes made by health care providers (40% vs. 27%).

And among the majority of Americans who see a problem

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Racist Medical doctors and Organ Burglars: Why So Lots of Black People today Distrust the Well being Care Procedure

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Discrimination, absence of accessibility, mistrust and mistreatment are not one of a kind to Black Us citizens Latinos and other minority teams practical experience it, far too. Inadequate men and women often hold out more time for worse treatment in underfunded, understaffed — and normally de facto racially segregated — public hospitals and clinics than richer, superior-insured men and women. And they know it.

Increasing up in Detroit, Michael Winans, now in his early 40s, was “too active obtaining by” to spend consideration to a syphilis experiment that finished right before he was born. But distrust of the professional medical establishment flowed in his spouse and children. His grandmother survived a stroke but died in the course of program observe-ups the loved ones suspected sub-par treatment. Later, his mother hesitated when she necessary fibroid surgery. When she last but not least went in, she ended up with an unforeseen hysterectomy. Winans appreciates that from time to time takes place, that the considerably less invasive procedure is not always more than enough. But was it required for his mom? He miracles.

“When you expand up in a predominantly Black town like Detroit, you can go significantly of your lifestyle without seriously interacting with somebody of yet another race,” he says. “If the initially time is when you have a well being concern … you request your self, ‘Does this man or woman care for me? Or see me as a variety?’ It is another level of prospective trepidation or worry.”

The Black American working experience is acquiring distinct scrutiny correct now, together with hopes for improve. Some of the folks interviewed for this story have been additional optimistic than other individuals about development. But none saw the wellness program as colour-blind.

“People see that I’m Black before they recognize — if they ever get to the place that they notice — that I have a PhD.,” claims Cara James, who ran the Office environment of Minority Wellness at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Companies throughout the Obama administration. James, who also formerly led operate on racial disparities at the Kaiser Loved ones Basis, is now the president and CEO of Grantmakers in Wellbeing, which operates with foundations and philanthropies to enhance well being care.

Points may have gotten better since the days when James would thoroughly pick which go well with to use as she accompanied her grandmother, an agricultural employee in the South with tiny formal training, to health-related appointments. But they have not enhanced plenty of.

“We are human,” she says, “We have perceptions and biases about others.”

All those biases can be refined — or not.

When Matthew Thompson, a economic officer at a reproductive wellbeing business in Texas, fell ill shortly immediately after relocating to Austin a couple yrs again, he did not however have a regular health practitioner but managed to get an appointment with a person. That health care provider, who was white, took a person appear at Thompson, a 40-some thing Black male,

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Supreme Court’s abortion decision puts doctors in legal limbo : Shots

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Dr. Kara Beasley protests the overturning of Roe vs. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court, in Denver, Colorado on June 24, 2022.

JASON CONNOLLY/AFP via Getty Images


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JASON CONNOLLY/AFP via Getty Images

Dr. Kara Beasley protests the overturning of Roe vs. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court, in Denver, Colorado on June 24, 2022.

JASON CONNOLLY/AFP via Getty Images

Historically, doctors have played a big role in abortion’s legality. Back in the 1860s, physicians with the newly-formed American Medical Association worked to outlaw abortion in the U.S.

A century later, they were doing the opposite.

In the 1950s and 1960s, when states were liberalizing abortion laws, “the charge for that actually came from doctors who said, ‘This is insane, we can’t practice medicine, we can’t exercise our medical judgment if you’re telling us that this is off the table,’ ” explains Melissa Murray, law professor at New York University.

The Supreme Court ruled in doctors’ favor in Roe v. Wade in 1973. The majority opinion spoke of “the right of a woman in consultation with her physician to choose an abortion,” Murray says.

Yet doctors and patients are all but absent from the latest Supreme Court majority opinion on abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In fact, in the opinion, Justice Samuel Alito uses the derogatory term “abortionist” instead of physician or doctor or obstetrician-gynecologist.

Legal experts say that signals a major shift in how the court views abortion, and creates a perilous new legal reality for physicians. In states where abortion is restricted, health care providers may be in the position of counseling patients who want an abortion, including those facing pregnancy complications, in a legal context that treats them as potential criminals.

For doctors, abortion restrictions create an 'impossible choice' when providing care

“Alito’s framing is that abortion is and was a crime – that’s the language he uses,” says Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. There’s no dispute, she says, that “the result of a decision overruling Roe in the short term is going to be the criminalization of doctors.”

Roe v. Wade was doctor-centered

Doctors were at the heart of the court’s first landmark ruling on abortion, Roe v. Wade.

“The original Roe decision – it was very, very doctor-centered – extremely so,” says Ziegler, who has written extensively on the legal history of abortion. “At its inception, this was a right that was very much about health care and about the doctor-patient relationship.”

Roe and the abortion decisions that came after it like Planned Parenthood v. Casey, “had the framework that abortion is some sort of individual right, but it’s also health care,” explains Carmel Shachar, executive director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School.

The court essentially told states: “You can put restrictions on abortion services and on provider qualifications as you do for other types of health care, and as long as they are not so onerous that we

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Community Care Doctors, CDPHP Crack Ground on New Headquarters and Health-related Arts Intricate

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Latham, N.Y. – Could 24, 2022 –Local community Treatment Physicians PLLC (CCP), CDPHP, and Columbia Advancement Companies right now broke ground on a a few-tale, 263,000 square foot, condition-of-the-artwork health-related arts complicated located at 6 Autopark Push in the City of Colonie.

The new facility, to be crafted by BBL Health care Amenities, will be the new headquarters for CCP and CDPHP.

CCP will be the primary tenant in the facility and will transfer all clinical services at this time presented at the Cash Region Well being Park in Latham two miles away to Autopark Drive, which will be renamed Wellness Way to replicate the providers remaining offered.

“CCP’s founding philosophy has always been to minimize the stress factor for our patients and to provide a high-quality and gratifying encounter for the affected person and the supplier,” said CCP Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Dr. Shirish Parikh. “Wellness Way will be a design case in point of providing a seamless health care delivery procedure to preserve a potent and meaningful affected individual-medical doctor connection.”

CCP specialties transferring to Wellness Way contain inner drugs, relatives medication, pediatrics, OB/GYN, lab, urgent treatment, health care imaging, radiation oncology, urology, interventional radiology, vascular medical procedures, thyroid well being, back and pain administration, general surgical procedure and endoscopy treatment, actual physical therapy, audiology, podiatry, and dermatology.

CCP strategies to increase rheumatology, developmental pediatrics, a devoted room for behavioral well being, an enlarged AAAASF treatment area to permit additional surgical specialties, and an expanded cancer care software with clinical and radiation oncology therapy merged in the new creating. Further specialties may perhaps be extra in the long run.

Wellness Way will present greater access to well timed, cost-powerful, excellent care for sufferers and advancement for CCP.

The facility is also the next move in the integration of expert services in between CCP and CDPHP, which a short while ago announced a partnership to kind a administration companies organization (MSO) to support all non-medical functions for the CCP loved ones of methods. The administration teams from CCP and CDPHP will be co-found at Wellness Way.

“Today’s groundbreaking is still an additional bold step ahead in our shift to create an built-in supply process in the Cash Location and over and above,” mentioned CDPHP President and CEO, Dr. John D. Bennett. “I want to thank Dr. Shirish Parikh and the whole crew at Group Treatment Physicians for sharing in our mission of strengthening the top quality, affordability, and knowledge of care in our neighborhood,” extra Bennett.

CDPHP will also have an onsite pharmacy, CDPHP Hook up Rx, and purchaser support centre, CDPHP Client Hook up, where members can fill prescriptions and get insurance issues answered.

CCP is made up of 1800 men and women, such as far more than 420 suppliers, all sharing one typical function – to produce nutritious communities, just one patient at a time. As soon as finished, the building will not only be property to CCP, the premier unbiased multispecialty practice in the area,

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Heartbeat-Tracking Know-how Raises Patients’ and Doctors’ Anxieties

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Darius Tahir

If someone’s heart skips a beat, tech companies want to let them know about it.

Gadget companies — beginning with Apple and now Fitbit, which is owned by Google — are advertising wearable equipment that check heartbeat rhythms and alert customers when something is out of sync.

These goods contain some feats of technological know-how. Quite a few use advanced optical sensors that peer beneath the pores and skin to keep track of how blood volume alterations — just about like monitoring the tides — and thus tally heartbeats. Other units have a miniature electrocardiogram — which data the heart’s electrical action — embedded. Both strategy can detect irregular heartbeats — and probably atrial fibrillation, a problem that impacts an estimated 2.7 million Us residents and drives up the possibility of stroke and coronary heart failure. When a particular person has it, the beating in the heart’s upper chambers is erratic, and blood does not flow as nicely as it ought to to the heart’s lessen chambers.

Even now, although the gadgets are a technological accomplishment, some cardiologists say the information the equipment produce is not constantly helpful. Notifications from the products aren’t definitive diagnoses.

It’s a conundrum, and a consequential one, for the health care program. Tens of millions of persons are armed with these devices, and if even a small fraction of those people get a ping, it could suggest substantially extra treatment and expenses for the process.

“The engineering has outpaced us,” mentioned Rod Passman, a cardiologist at Northwestern University who’s helping with a examine examining the Apple Watch’s means to monitor for the heart rhythm ailment. “Industry came out with these items simply because they could. Now we’re enjoying catch-up and seeking to figure out what to do with this data.”

Coronary heart rhythm sensors are among the a lot of resources packed into these wearables. End users can have their techniques counted, their slumber tracked, and their gaits analyzed. Some goods will simply call 911 if the wearer has been in a auto crash or experienced a terrible tumble.

People capabilities are meant to make people the protagonists in protecting their health. Through an function touting Fitbit’s atrial fibrillation function, organization co-founder James Park explained it was a single of numerous options of the brand’s health and fitness-monitoring bands that are “making users simply in management of health and fitness and wellness.”

The wearable’s atrial fibrillation ping — a “test [doctors] didn’t order,” Passman mentioned — tells people there’s a thing probably irregular. Eventually, although, any procedure is still left to the health care provider.

The original visits never normally deliver swift answers. To corroborate a notification, a cardiologist outfits individuals with professional medical-quality diagnostics — a patch or cumbersome observe — that are more precise than wearables. (The Apple Enjoy, for illustration, is cleared by the Fda for “informational use only.”) That fancier gadget may have to operate for a although to catch a momentary missed beat. That ready indicates a

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