A “new era” in medicine does not come along very often. We had one, perhaps, in 1854 when John Snow effectively invented the practical applications of epidemiology by removing the handle from London’s Broad Street water pump. We had one about 50 years prior when Edward Jenner discovered the prevention of smallpox with vaccination. We had one when the value to public health of basic sanitation was first sorted out; we had one when micronutrients were discovered to cure and prevent various deficiency syndromes; and we had one when Alexander Fleming and a bit of serendipity combined to discover penicillin, and usher in the antibiotic age.
When the PURE diet study papers roiled headlines around the world recently, I wrote an admittedly lengthy analysis. I didn’t feel I had much choice; the publications encompassed three distinct research papers, reams of data, and a whole lot of what proved to be mostly misguided interpretation of the findings by the media, and the investigators themselves. Getting the story sorted out reliably involved some heavy lifting, and considerable verbiage.
A clinical decision support system (CDSS) is a health information technology system that is designed to provide physicians and other health professionals with clinical decision support (CDS), that is, assistance with clinical decision-making tasks. A working definition has been proposed by Robert Hayward of the Centre for Health Evidence: "Clinical decision support systems link health observations with health knowledge to influence health choices by clinicians for improved health care". CDSSs constitute a major topic in artificial intelligence in medicine.
Personalizing medicine is among the salient themes of modern advance, and clearly among the more widely captivating. President Obama emphasized “precision medicine,” effectively the same thing, as a priority for the nation in the context of the cancer moonshot he endorsed in his State of the Union Address in 2016. In the past year, two radical cancer treatment advances have been announced, one for leukemia, one for lymphoma, both involving the genetic re-engineering of a patient’s own cells into customized chemotherapy.
Value based care means data driven care, whether it be clinical care, drugs, devices or digital therapeutics. Consequently, we are seeing convergent products that not only deliver, but measure the results as part of a whole product solution that drives and measures not only compliance and adherence, but results and pricing.
Being a healthcare provider is really hard. Here’s one way to make it easier. Being a healthcare provider means it’s highly likely that the people we take care of on a daily basis are sick.
A very long time ago, I can remember walking into the Palmer House in Chicago to take my board examination administered by the American Board of Otolaryngology and Ophthalmology...yes, that's how long ago it was when both boards were combined. Remember EENT's?