1994 seems a long time ago. Prior to the new century we didn’t have tablets, our modern day smart phones or as readily available wireless access in homes and public places. In our hospitals, electronic health records (EHRs) were on the rise but not as hotly implemented…
A friend sent me an email 2 weeks ago about his experience in establishing care. A young male in his early 20s, he is healthy and was looking only for a physical. He had a less than stellar experience with the physician who saw him. “Is it just me or does it feel like mechanics gather more data on an initial inspection than doctors do during physicals?” he wrote, “I’m pretty sure that humans are more complex than most internal combustion engines.” He had a point. His concern is a common one: feeling like a physician’s quick glance at vitals and listening through the stethescope were not quite thorough enough. If there was something to be found, would this physician have found it? Our ensuing conversation and his experience was about expectations. We want our doctors to spend a sufficient amount of time on us to gather real data but we’ve come to expect our doctors to be in a hurry. A physician who takes his time is heralded as being above the curve. Those who don’t are never considered to be considerate of our time only sloppy with theirs. In order for healthcare delivery to be effective a physician […]
There’s something very exciting about MedCrunch’s new tagline: Hacking Health. It speaks to many elements about the field of medicine and this magazine’s role in it. In a conversation with a med school classmate this morning we discussed an attending physician he worked with who really impressed him.
Watching the Olympics this summer has been a wonderfully guilty pleasure. Between the various levels of drama about what Ryan Lochte’s mom may have meant about his social life , unnecessary discussions about Olympic Gold All-Round Women Gymnasts champion Gabby Douglas’s hair and concerns about whether the US Women’s Swimming Team smiles too much (sorry we’re only getting US coverage over here — what else is new.) there are relevant discussions about exercise, health and motivation. As a physician in training my curiosity about these topics extends not only to my own health but to the health of my patients. I wonder constantly how I can help motivate for better health. I recently finished a month long clinical rotation in outpatient specialty clinics where in 30min-1hr sessions we ran through the list of medical problems for each patient. We checked through their labs and imaging scans. Somehow, we still found time to counsel and motivate them to do what they could do on their own as we did what we could on our end. The question, however, is always to what extent? In David Jones, MD, PhD’s perspective article published in the New England Journal Of Medicine last week, he takes […]
Podmedics, founded in the UK in 2007, got started as a way for founder and former family practitioner Ed Wallitt to make use of travel time by recording his medical notes by dictaphone. The notes became popular among classmates prompting his desire to release the notes to the general public through his website and itunes where it became a featured podcast. Podmedics now features both podcasts and an online learning environment where a user can keep and download notes associated with the podcasts. Their latest work, The Podmedics Do Surgery, is getting attention as it is the first medical ibook created specifically for medical students. Podmedics started out as a series of podcasts on various medical topics. How did the ibook come about? Wallitt: ibooks immediately opened up the possibility for really anybody who can work a word processor to be able to produce a textbook. But not just any textbook — a textbook that includes also interactive images and video. So for us at podmedics this was perfect. We already have all these videos and we have a large image bank as well. So it was just a question of getting a grip on the technology and […]
With the introduction of Apple’s Siri in the last year, free-form speech recognition has exploded in the mainstream. The technology around Siri, however, has been used in the medical field for some time for documentation with programs like well-known Dragon Medical™ by Nuance Healthcare. Nuance’s CMIO, Nick van Terheyden, MD was willing to speak with me about the advances Nuance has made in the domain of speech recognition, data mining, and documentation innovation in the healthcare space. Dr. van Terheyden has been in the healthcare industry for > 25 years, working in imaging and other internet startups before coming to Nuance and finding his niche as a clinician advocate to adopting technology in standard practice. Dragon, now on its 10th medical version has been used commonly within healthcare enterprises, including in radiology reading rooms across the country for dictating reads of XRay/CT/MRI films and more. Over its time, it has been adapted to take into account accents across the world in addition to learning and increasing its vocabulary each time someone dictates. The next innovations in this space are what one would expect: with the data Dragon is collecting, clinical language understanding is growing. With the use of such ontologies […]
We discuss often the ways in which medicine prolongs life: controlled infections with antibiotics, life saving organ transplants, vaporized tumors and the like. Just as important are the ways in which medicine improves quality of life or gives explanation to the things we fear: the disabilities we can see. A friend of mine who teaches freshman English invited me to attend her school’s production of ‘The Elephant Man” by Bernard Pomerance. The play, set in the late 1880s, chronicles the journey of the real-life Joseph Merrick, a man so naturally deformed since childhood that he was displayed as a show. His swollen arms, face and legs made those who saw him believe he was half-elephant, half-man. Later abandoned by his show manager, Merrick, goes to live in a London hospital under the care of Dr. Frederick Treves’s, a young surgeon who wants to study the cause of Merrick’s deformities for the interest of science. I knew little of the play before watching but found its content and historical background incredibly relevant to the intersection between medicine and the culture of disability. For many of us, our sicknesses are internal or even silently waiting to reveal themselves. For those however whose disease can be […]