A few days ago ProPublica had a headline I wished I'd written: If It Needs A Sign, It's Probably Bad Design. Although the article started with a health care example (EpiPen of course, citing Joyce Lee's brilliant post), it wasn't focused on health care -- but it might as well have been. Health care is full of bad design, and of signs. Take, for example, the waiting room. When most patients enter a provider's office or facility, the first thing they are likely to see is a waiting room. The waiting room probably has other would-be patients already waiting there, each full of their own health concerns. In some instances, the initial waiting room is merely a staging area; once processed, patients may be sent to yet another waiting room to wait some more. And, of course, once they eventually do reach an exam room, they'll probably endure some more waiting, no matter how long their wait has already been...
ProPublica
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Doctors And Hospitals Got At Least $3.5 Billion From Industry In Just Five Months
...Lawsuits in recent years revealed that doctors' relationships with industry can alter their prescribing practices and decision-making for the worse, and pharmaceutical companies have paid out billions of dollars in fines for fraudulent marketing practices...
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Doctors' Dubious Excuses For Taking Pharmaceutical Companies' Money
Pro Publica has updated their database of payments by pharmaceutical payments to physicians and organizations. It now has data from 15 companies totaling more than $2 billion from 2009 to 2012. To accompany Pro Publica's report, a number of news outlets wrote about payments given to local or regional doctors... Read More »
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Elections 2012: Missing From The Debate – The Indian Health System
There is one public health “system” in the United States. Its cost per patient is lower than the rest of the country. Some of the clinics and hospitals are models of what health care could be … and at the same time some of the clinics are substandard and represent the worst of what we think of as government-run health care. Read More »
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Hospital Medical Errors Now The Third Leading Cause Of Death In The U.S.
Medical errors leading to patient death are much higher than previously thought, and may be as high as 400,000 deaths a year, according to a new study in the Journal of Patient Safety. Read More »
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How Many Die From Medical Mistakes in U.S. Hospitals?
Now comes a study in the current issue of the Journal of Patient Safety that says the numbers may be much higher — between 210,000 and 440,000 patients each year who go to the hospital for care suffer some type of preventable harm that contributes to their death, the study says.
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Open Payments Website Opens Tuesday; Database Spotlights Physician Payments
Dr. Uzma Samadani, a New York City neurosurgeon, publicly discloses that she receives 6 percent of her revenue from research funding and has equity in a startup medical technology firm she founded. Samadani and about 300 other doctors and clinicians are members of “Who's My Doctor?,” a new national group that encourages physicians to not only disclose to patients their financial relationships with medical manufacturers, but also report other details about their professional finances, such as whether they receive fee-for-service payments that could motivate them to perform more services...
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Q&A with Andy Oram: How Can We Tell Whether Predictive Analytics Are Biased?
The fear of reproducing society's prejudices through computer algorithms is being hotly discussed in both academic publications and the popular press. Just a few of the publications warning about bias in predictive analytics include the New York Times, the Guardian, the Harvard Business Review, and particularly a famous and hotly contested article by Propublica on predictions of recidivism among criminal defendants...
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Revealed: The NSA’s Secret Campaign to Crack, Undermine Internet Security
Newly revealed documents show that the NSA has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption that automatically secures the emails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world. The project, referred to internally by the codename Bullrun, also includes efforts to weaken the encryption standards adopted by software developers. Read More »
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Solving Design Problems in Healthcare Starting with the Waiting Room
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What Feds' Push To Share Health Data Means For Patients
Two years ago, when the federal government first released data on how much Medicare paid physicians, the media coverage was widespread. Doctors who earned significant sums were dubbed "Medicare millionaires" and journalists highlighted unusual patterns in how some doctors bill for services. When Medicare released its third round of data last Thursday, the coverage was practically nonexistent. In some ways, that's because data releases from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have become almost routine...
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What You Don't Know About Your Doctor Could Hurt You
Thousands of doctors across the U.S. are on medical probation for reasons including drug abuse, sexual misconduct, and making careless—sometimes deadly—mistakes. But they're still out there practicing. And good luck figuring out who they are. The state medical board's report on Leonard Kurian, an obstetrician-gynecologist in Southern California, tells in stark clinical detail what it says happened to several patients in his care. And it's not easy to read...
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When Government Rules by Software, Citizens Are Left in the Dark
IN JULY, SAN Francisco Superior Court Judge Sharon Reardon considered whether to hold Lamonte Mims, a 19-year-old accused of violating his probation, in jail. One piece of evidence before her: the output of algorithms known as PSA that scored the risk that Mims, who had previously been convicted of burglary, would commit a violent crime or skip court. Based on that result, another algorithm recommended that Mims could safely be released, and Reardon let him go. Five days later, police say, he robbed and murdered a 71-year old man...
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