From The Gary Bisbee Show: UPHS CEO Kevin Mahoney joined “The Gary Bisbee Show” to speak about his career path, leadership lessons, and innovations driven at Penn Medicine. “If innovation can be an activity in daily living, you rewire your brain to not think about the way we were doing it, but the way we could do it,” Mahoney shared. Listen to the full episode at The Gary Bisbee Show.
From The Philadelphia Inquirer: Written by Christina A. Roberto, Laura A. Gibson, and Robert W. Ballenger, During the chemical spill last March that imperiled the city’s biggest water treatment plant, nearly one million Philadelphians feared losing access to safe drinking water. Most residents are not used to living with such a threat. But many of our fellow Philadelphians will experience that fear and uncertainty every year — not because of contamination, but because of poverty. Water security — the ability to reliably access safe water — is recognized by the Pennsylvania Constitution as a basic human right, yet tens of…
From STAT: When gastroenterologists learned in March that UnitedHealthcare plans to barricade many colonoscopies behind a controversial and complicated process known as prior authorization, their emotions cycled rapidly between fear, shock, and outrage. The change, which the health insurer will implement on June 1, means that any United member seeking surveillance and diagnostic colonoscopies to detect cancer will first need approval from United — or else have to pay out of pocket. “It was stunning,” said Dayna Early, a gastroenterologist at Washington University in St. Louis and chair of the American College of Gastroenterology’s board of governors. “It applies to everything we…
From Philadelphia Magazine: Of all our fears about aging, the greatest may be our fear of losing control. Having your driver’s license revoked, being forced into a nursing home — it’s unspeakably depressing to contemplate relinquishing agency over your most basic activities and independence, even when it’s for the best. In Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, Atul Gawande describes philosopher Ronald Dworkin’s observation about autonomy and how it applies to the aging process: “Whatever the limits and travails we face, we want to retain the autonomy — the freedom — to be the authors of our lives.”…
From MedCityNews: Hospitals across the country are facing financial pressure. But the situation is especially severe among safety net hospitals — those that treat patients regardless of their ability to pay. Low-income Americans already face major barriers when it comes to healthcare access, and that problem could worsen significantly if safety net hospitals across the country close because of financial challenges. A shift from fee-for-service payment models to value-based payments models won’t do much to remedy this problem, experts argued during a session that took place last week at the HIMSS conference in Chicago. Care provided to low-income individuals in the U.S. is extremely…
From Marketing Week: Soon after you arrive at work, you have a meeting in the boardroom with potential clients. When you enter, the room is full. Your boss is struggling valiantly to load up the slides. So, to fill the time, you introduce yourself to everyone there, vigorously shaking hands and making small talk. When you introduce yourself to the final client, she reminds you that you’ve met before. Twice. You splutter an apology. You shouldn’t feel embarrassed about forgetting a face. You’re not alone; the vast majority of information we take in is quickly forgotten. In fact, the fallibility of…
From MedPage Today: ChatGPT was good at answering low-complexity cardiology questions, but came up short on more complicated cases, researchers found. When analyzing a series of case vignettes of cardiology-related questions that patients had for their primary care providers, the generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool answered correctly 90% of the time. But with a more complex set of vignettes involving questions that primary care doctors referred to their cardiology colleagues, the technology only answered correctly half of the time, reported Ralf Harskamp, MD, PhD, and Lukas de Clercq, MSc, of Amsterdam UMC in the Netherlands. ChatGPT also performed decently well when…
From The New York Times: By Emily Largent, Andrew Peterson and Jason Karlawish Conservative Texans and liberal Californians disagree on much in politics. But legislators in both states agree on a new approach to giving people with cognitive impairments a greater chance for self-determination. It’s called supported decision-making, and it is shaping up to be the most consequential change in the care of older people and others with limitations in mental functioning since the rise of advance care directives in the 1990s. The difference between guardianship, the traditional way to help those with such impairments, and supported decision-making is analogous to the difference between a dictatorship…
From AJMC: The cost and availability of pharmaceuticals is a prime area for reform as there is a lack of equity, said Clifford Goodman, PhD, senior vice president, The Lewin Group. Goodman moderated a panel discussion on advancing pharmacoequity and enhancing access to essential medications at the Value-Based Insurance Design (V-BID) Summit, hosted by the University of Michigan’s V-BID Center. Pharmacoequity was coined by Utibe Essien, MD, MPH, in 2021, and is defined as “ensuring that all individuals, regardless of race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or availability of resources, have access to the highest-quality medications required to manage their health…
From Everyday Health: The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped our lives in ways that most of us could never have imagined. In response to stay-at-home mandates, we embraced technologies — hello two-hour grocery delivery! — that enabled us to check off most of our to-do list without ever moving from the couch. Unfortunately, it seems Americans may have gotten a little too good at taking shortcuts, and our activity levels haven’t returned to pre-pandemic levels, according to a new nationwide study. On average, the nearly 5,500 participants took about 600 fewer steps per day compared with how much they walked before the pandemic began, says lead…
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