Categories

Tag: Kevin Wang

Primary Care Is at the Center of a Health Revolution

By KEVIN WANG, MD

If our urgent-care-as-healthcare culture isn’t killing us, it’s certainly wasting our time and resources. 

Consider these facts highlighted by Advanced Medical Reviews, based on various studies: 

  • U.S. physicians report that more than 20 percent of overall medical care is not needed.
  • The Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that up to 30 percent of the costs of medical care delivered in the U.S. pay for tests, procedures, doctor visits, hospital stays, and other services that may not actually improve patient health.
  • Unnecessary medical treatment impacts the healthcare industry through decreased physician productivity, increased cost of medical care, and additional work for front office staff and other healthcare professionals.

Most of today’s primary care is, in retail terms, a loss leader — a well-oiled doorway to the wildly expensive sick care system. For decades, practitioners have been forced into production factories, seeing as many patients, ordering as many tests, and sending as many referrals as possible to specialists. Patients, likewise, have avoided going in for regular visits for fear of the price tag attached, often waiting until they’re in such bad shape that urgent (and much more expensive) care is necessary.

The system as it stands isn’t delivering primary care in a way that serves patients, providers, employers, or insurers as well as it could. To improve health at individual and population levels, the system needs to be disrupted. Primary care needs to play a much larger role in healthcare, and it needs to be delivered in a way that doesn’t make patients feel isolated, neglected, or dismissed. 

Luckily, primary care is making a comeback — the kind that doesn’t just treat symptoms, but sees trust, engagement, and behavior change as a path to health.  

Continue reading…

How a Washing Machine Inspired Me to See the Future of a Safer ICU

Berg, the company the brought along fun internet-connected concepts and products such as the Little Printer released this interesting video recently.

[vimeo=87522764 W=900&H=325]

The amazing part of this is that Cloudwash is foundational and will just be built on. It shows where the current state of the Internet of Things is and where it can go in the future. What Berg did was amazing to me.

It took a regular “dumb” appliance with software and electronics that were trapped in and made the interaction richer and its meaning and value richer.

In a way, they radically changed the way I viewed how devices could be connected and created the possibility for a new class of devices in our daily lives.

And in a way, I saw so many parallels to healthcare.

In the video, Berg mentioned how the action of washing clothes can be quite complicated. There are baroque symbols on how clothes should be treated and this in turn is reflected by different sets of complicated icons on machines

Healthcare delivery can be far more complex though.

“In any given hospital, as many as 15 medical devices, including monitors, ventilators and infusion pumps, are connected to an ICU patient, but because they are made by different companies, they don’t “talk” with one another. Patient-controlled analgesic pumps that deliver powerful narcotics, where a known side effect is respiratory depression, aren’t linked to devices that monitor breathing, for example.”Today’s ICU is arguably more dangerous than ever,” says Peter Pronovost.

Just last week, I had the privilege of shadowing the pain service team at work. The team had to go one by one to each patient while rounding throughout the hospital. At each patient, a nurse practitioner checked their PCA. These are supposed to the safest ways to deliver analgesics and are self-containing boxes that are locked except for their interface.

No one except the pain service team is supposed to even touch those boxes due to the level of training needed to even interface with them. But it relies on human systems to ensure that the correct concentration of drug is put in with the right dosage according to each patient.

Yet like Dr. Pronovost mentions, these pumps aren’t linked to devices that monitor breathing so that IF a wrong dosage is placed in the PCA, there is no way of stopping it before its too late.

Continue reading…

assetto corsa mods