Why Did It Take a Pandemic to Be Able to Use Telehealth?
In early April I had a routine consultation with my electrophysiologist at Nuvance Health via telehealth. Nuvance uses telehealth technology from American Well. In preparation for the consult, I took my blood pressure with a Qardio cuff and my iPhone, weighed myself on the Fitbit scale, and took a 30-second ECG with the Apple Watch. […]
AI Detects Heart Failure From One Beat
Heart failure has been in the news a lot lately. It used to be the disease of older people, but younger ones (40-50) are gaining. The negative trend for younger people is mostly related to lifestyle. For us older (and wiser?) people, nearly 10 percent of those over 65 are afflicted with some form of […]
When Have We Seen Enough Drug Ads on TV?
I believe Alex Azar, Secretary of Health and Human Services, is doing a good job of trying to improve our broken healthcare system. The move to allow states to seek a Federal waiver to implement Medicaid in ways tailored to their needs has a lot of potential. Some states have already shown they can reduce […]
Medicare to Negotiate with Pharmaceutical Industry
In March 2015, Health Attitude: Unraveling and Solving the Complexities of Healthcare was published. One of the recommendations made in the book, to address the spiraling healthcare cost for Americans, was to allow Medicare to negotiate the price of drugs. It was a lone voice at the time, but since then more and more people, including the […]
Biobanks for Population Health
As millions of consumers and providers add data to patient EHRs, a multitude of data will become available for the greater good. Researchers can anonymize the data and combine it with a large database containing vast amounts of information about the health of the population at a community level, nationally, or globally. In order to […]