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THCB Gang Episode 120, Thursday March 16

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Joining Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) on #THCBGang on Thursday March 16 at 1PM PT 4PM ET were futurist Ian Morrison (@seccurve); medical historian Mike Magee (@drmikemagee); patient safety expert and all around wit Michael Millenson (@mlmillenson); and delivery & platform expert Vince Kuraitis (@VinceKuraitis). Lots of discussion about the Walgreens not selling abortifacients, Silicon Valley Bank’s impact on digital health, and how hospitals are doing.

You can see the video below & if you’d rather listen than watch, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels.

Two Patients With More Than One Diagnosis

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BY HANS DUVEFELT

I have written many times about how I have made a better diagnosis than the doctor who saw my patient in the emergency room. That doesn’t mean I’m smarter or even that I have a better batting average. I don’t know how often it is the other way around, but I do know that sometimes I’m wrong about what causes my patient’s symptoms.

We all work under certain pressures, from overbooked clinic schedules to overfilled emergency room waiting areas, from “poor historians” (patients who can’t describe their symptoms or their timeline very well) to our own mental fatigue after many hours on the job.

My purpose in writing about these cases is to show how disease, the enemy in clinical practice if you will, can present and evolve in ways that can fool any one of us. We simply can’t evaluate every symptom to its absolute fullest. That would clog “the system” and leave many patients entirely without care. So we formulate the most reasonable diagnosis and treatment plan we can and tell the patient or their caregiver that they will need followup, especially if symptoms change or get worse.

Martha is a group home resident with intellectual disabilities, who once underwent a drastic change in her behavior and self care skills. She even seemed a bit lethargic. A big workup in the emergency room could only demonstrate one abnormality: Her head CT showed a massive sinus infection. She got antibiotics and perked up with a ten day course of antibiotics.

A month later, her condition deteriorated again. It was on the weekend. This time she had a mild cough. Her chest X-ray showed double sided pneumonia. She got antibiotics again and started to feel better.

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Letting AI Physicians Into the Guild

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BY KIM BELLARD

Let’s be honest: we’re going to have AI physicians.  

Now, that prediction comes with a few caveats. It’s not going to be this year, and maybe not even in this decade. We may not call them “physicians,” but, rather, may think of them as a new category entirely. AI will almost certainly first follow its current path of become assistive technology, for human clinicians and even patients.  We’re going to continue to struggle to fit them into existing regulatory boxes, like clinical decision support software or medical devices, until those boxes prove to be the wrong shape and size for how AI capabilities develop.

But, even given all that, we are going to end up with AI physicians.  They’re going to be capable of listening to patients’ symptoms, of evaluating patient history and clinical indicators, and of both determining likely diagnosis and suggested treatments.  With their robot underlings, or other smart devices, they’ll even be capable of performing many/most of those treatments. 

We’re going to wonder how we ever got along without them. 

Many people claim to not be ready for this. The Pew Research Center recently found that 60% of Americans would be uncomfortable if their physician even relied on AI for their care, and were  more worried that health care professionals would adopt AI technologies too fast rather than too slow.  

Still, though, two-thirds of the respondents already admit that they’d want AI to be used in their skin cancer screening, and one has to believe that as more people understand the kinds of things AI is already assisting with, much less the things it will soon help with, the more open they’ll be.    

People claim to value the patient-physician relationship, but what we really want is to be healthy.  AI will be able to help us with that.

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A big data COVID train wreck

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BY ANISH KOKA

If there was any doubt the academic research enterprise is completely broken, we have an absolute train wreck of a study in one of the many specialty journals of the Journal of the American Medical Association — JAMA Health.

I had no idea the journal even existed until today, but I now know to approach the words printed in this journal to the words printed in supermarket tabloids. You should too!

The paper that was brought to my attention is one that purports to examine the deleterious health effects of Long COVID. A sizable group of intellectuals who are still socially distancing and wearing n95s live in fear of a syndrome that persists long after a person recovers from COVID. There are any number of papers that argue a variety of putative mechanisms for how an acute COVID infection may result in long term health concerns. This particular piece of research that is amplified by the usual credentialed suspects on social media found “increased rates of adverse outcomes over a 1-year period for a PCC (post-COVID conditions) cohort surviving the acute phase of illness.”

In this case PCC (Post-COVID conditions), is the stand-in for Long COVID, and leading commentators use this paper to explicitly state that heart attacks, strokes and other major adverse outcomes doubled in people post-COVID at 1 year…

It is a crazy statement, and anyone regurgitating this has no business commenting on any scientific papers. Let me explain why.

In order to find out about the potential ravages of long COVID researchers need to be able to compare outcomes between those who were infected with COVID and now have long covid to those who were never infected with COVID. At this point finding a large enough group of people that never had covid is impossible, because everyone in the world will have been infected with COVID many, many times. It’s also really hard to define the nebulous long COVID because a study after study finds no clear objective markers of the disease.

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Practicing at the Top of Your License is Not an Option for Primary Care Physicians

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BY HANS DUVEFELT

You don’t really need a medical degree to know how to follow an immunization schedule, to recommend a colonoscopy, or order a screening mammogram (as long as, in this country, there is a standing order – in some places, mass screenings are done outside the primary care system).

You also don’t really need a medical degree to enter data into an EMR.

And when you decide to order a test, how many of the EMR “workflow” steps really require your expertise? I mean, borrowing from my iPhone, you could say “order a CBC” and facial recognition could document that you are the ordering physician. Really!

And you don’t really need a medical degree to, as I put it, open and sort the (electronic) mail; an eye doctor’s report comes in and if the patient is a diabetic, I have to forward it to my nurse for logging, and if not a diabetic, just sign off on it. And don’t imagine there is time in our day, evening or weekend to actually read the whole report. Patient A saw their eye doctor – check. Next…

Primary care in this country is pathetically arcane and inefficient. And we have a shortage of primary care physicians, they say. If we could all practice at the top of our license, perhaps not. It’s time to reimagine, reinvent, reinvigorate!

Hans Duvefelt is a physician, author, and writer of “A Country Doctor Writes.”

THCB Gang Episode 119, Thursday March 9

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Joining Matthew Holt (@boltyboy) on #THCBGang on Thursday March 9 were writer Kim Bellard (@kimbbellard), benefits expert Jennifer Benz (@Jenbenz); Suntra Modern Recovery CEO JL Neptune; and special guest digital health investment banker Steven Wardell (@StevenWardell). Lots of conversation about Walgreens and the reaction to its non-sales of abortifacients and the possible outcomes. Then a round up of the latest in digital health financing.

If you’d rather listen, the “audio only” version is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels — Matthew Holt

What Would John Henry Rauch Do Today As A HIT Entrepreneur?

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BY MIKE MAGEE

Health entrepreneurs today tend to give themselves very high grades, and seem surprised when their creations fall short of expectations due to a disconnect with funders or regulators with legal authority. But Medicine isn’t fair, and genius is not that common.

What other conclusion can you draw from the thousands of references and citations featuring Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush and his wild ideas on how to heroically treat Yellow Fever in 1793, but likely never heard of Dr. John Henry Rauch. The former signed the Declaration of Independence but directly or indirectly contributed to many an unpleasant death.  The latter saved millions and helped the AMA and the AAMC find their way out of their post-Civil War professional wilderness.

Dr. Rauch’s career, its’ span and breadth, is startling and could well serve as a yardstick for medical imagineers today. Born in Lebanon, PA in 1828, he received his Medical Degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and then opened a practice in Burlington, Iowa. He was there in 1850 for the birthing of the Iowa State Medical Society, and with their encouragement published (just five years after Iowa achieved statehood) the epic “Medical and Economic Botany of Iowa” listing 516 species, fully 23% of the known flora of the state today.

Two decades later, he was onsite in Chicago from October 8-10, 1871, when 3.3 square miles of Chicago burned to the ground taking 300 souls with it, and managed the emergency medical aftermath for the city. By then he was all too familiar with conflagration and disaster, having earned the  imprimatur of lieutenant-colonel from the Union Army as assistant medical-director of the famed Army of Virginia during the Civil War.

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OI May Be The Next AI

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In the past few months, artificial intelligence (AI) has suddenly seemed to come of age, with “generative AI” showing that AI was capable of being creative in ways that we thought was uniquely human.  Whether it is writing, taking tests, creating art, inventing things, making convincing deepfake videos, or conducting searches on your behalf, AI is proving its potential.  Even healthcare has figured out a surprising number of uses.

It’s fun to speculate about which AI — ChatGPT, Bard, DeepMind, Sydney, etc. – will prove “best,” but it turns out that “AI” as we’ve known it may become outdated.  Welcome to “organoid intelligence” (OI).

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I’d been vaguely aware of researchers working with lab-grown brain cells, but I was caught off-guard when Johns Hopkins University researchers announced organoid intelligence (a term they coined) as “the new frontier in biocomputing and intelligence-in-a-dish.”  Their goal: 

…we present a collaborative program to implement the vision of a multidisciplinary field of OI. This aims to establish OI as a form of genuine biological computing that harnesses brain organoids using scientific and bioengineering advances in an ethically responsible manner.

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Matthew’s health care tidbits: Oh, the DEA makes me sigh….

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Each time I send out the THCB Reader, our newsletter that summarizes the best of THCB (Sign up here!) I include a brief tidbits section. Then I had the brainwave to add them to the blog. They’re short and usually not too sweet! –Matthew Holt

I have always thought that the dual role of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) was an anachronism that severely hampers America’s complex relationship with pharmaceuticals. Congress deems some medicines legal and regulates them via the FDA, and deems others illegal and tells the DEA and other law enforcement agencies to attempt to control their supply. Leaving aside the basic futility of this task, somehow DEA was also given the task of regulating the prescribers of legal prescription (and non-prescription) drugs–in particular those around controlled substances.

This has led to decades of DEA-led persecution of doctors, patients and even convenience store clerks in the name of reducing the diversion of opiates and methamphetamines. Of course going after any of these folks is much easier and less risky than hunting a Mexican cartel or busting real criminals, so it’s easy to see why the DEA has taken that approach. Has it worked in reducing the supply of opiates? Maybe. Has it had any impact on the opiate crisis? Not really. Have a whole lot of patients been caught in the crossfire? Yup.

Now the DEA is moving onto the next phase–re-regulating the online prescribing of controlled substances that was liberalized at the start of the public health emergency in 2020. As you can imagine, their proposals are not exactly bursting with reason.

The DEA is essentially banning all controlled prescribing without a face to face visit first. This is despite the fact that the demand for those mental health medications increased dramatically during the pandemic as rates of depression and anxiety went up by a factor of three. While you can argue that in 2021 and 2022 some online services (notably Cerebral) may–and I stress may–have crossed the over-prescribing line for ADHD and other conditions, there’s no evidence that what happened is any worse than the in-person care that the DEA has been inadequately overseeing for decades. More importantly, those online services have already pulled out of those exact therapeutic markets the DEA is alarmed about. Who is left providing online ADHD care? Local clinicians and reputable services. And of course DEA knows full well, and is doing nothing about, the lack of access to mental health professionals that existed long before the increase in demand.

Is there any reason to suspect DEA will improve the quality of the system dealing with these medications? Highly doubtful. There are two current examples suggesting why not. First, due to the increased demand from the pandemic induced mental-health crisis and production problems at pharma company Teva, there’s a massive shortage of ADHD medication already. The DEA could help patients out here, but have declined to increase production quotas–sending millions of patients and their parents on a wild goose chase hunting down pharmacies with actual supply of Adderall and related meds.

Secondly, the DEA wants to also ban the the online prescribing of another drug, buprenorphine, which is used to help wean patients with substance use disorder off opiates and other substances. OK, so there’s a one month grace period here but essentially this is a short-sighted ban that will directly lead to patients going to the black market to acquire opiates, leading to more addiction and death.

My conclusion is that the DEA should be removed from its oversight of licensed clinicians and that role be given to FDA or HHS. At the least these proposed  regulations should be abandoned and rolled back to what we have now. The only good news is that there is still time to comment on the regulations. I went and did so and I hope you will too. Patients have suffered enough already.

Ecology Rescued the AMA and Medical Professionalism Beginning in 1870. Will technology and science rescue the profession once again?

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BY MIKE MAGEE

Medicine does not exist in a vacuum. The trusting relationships that underpin it function within an ever-changing environment of shifting social determinants. This is not new, nor surprising.

Consider for example the results of their 1851 survey of 12,400 men from the eight leading U.S. colleges had to be shocking. The AMA was only four years old at the time and being forced to acknowledge a significant lack of public interest in a physician’s services. This in turn had caused the best and the brightest to choose other professions. There it was in black and white. Of those surveyed, 26% planned to pursue the clergy, 26% the law, and less than 8% medicine.

It wasn’t that doctors with training (roughly 10% of those calling themselves “doctor” at the time) lacked influence. They had been influential since the birth of the nation. Four signers of the Declaration of Independence were physicians – Benjamin Rush, Josiah Bartlett, Lyman Hall, and Mathew Thorton. Twenty-six others were attendees at the Continental Congress. But making a living as a physician, that was a different story.

During the first half of the 19th century, the market for doctoring went from bad to worse. Economic conditions throughout a largely rural nation encouraged independent self-reliance and self-help. The politics of the day were economically liberal and anti-elitist, which meant that state legislatures refused to impose regulations or grant licensing power to legitimate state medical societies. Absent these controls, proprietary “irregular medical schools” spawned all manner of “doctors” explaining why 40,000 individuals competed for patients by 1850 – up from 5000 (of which only 300 had degrees) in 1790.

The ecology of 1850’s medicine couldn’t be worse. The marketplace was a perfect storm – equal parts stubborn self-reliance, absence of licensure to promote professional standards, diploma mills that showed little interest in scientific advancement, and massive unimpeded entry of low quality competitors. 

The legitimate doctors in those early days saw 5 patients on a good day. Horse travel on poor roads, and the absence of remote systems for communication, meant doctors had to be summoned in person to attend a birth or injury. And patients lost a day’s work to travel all the way to town for a visit of questionable worth. The direct and indirect costs for both doctor and patient were unsustainable. As a result, most doctors had multiple careers to augment their income.

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