Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Patients With Disabilities? No Thanks, Say Some Doctors
The doctors also explained why they could be so eager to get rid of these patients, focusing on the shrinking amount of time doctors are allotted to spend with individual patients. 鈥淪eeing patients at a 15-minute clip is absolutely ridiculous,鈥 one doctor said. 鈥淭o have someone say, 鈥榃ell we鈥檙e still going to see those patients with mild to moderate disability in those time frames鈥 鈥 it鈥檚 just unreasonable and it鈥檚 unacceptable to me.鈥 (Kolata, 10/19)
Read More On The Research In Health Affairs:
Also 鈥
KHN: Blind To Problems: How VA鈥檚 Electronic Record System Shuts Out Visually Impaired Patients聽
Sarah Sheffield, a nurse practitioner at a Veterans Affairs clinic in Eugene, Oregon, had a problem. Her patients 鈥 mostly in their 70s and beyond 鈥 couldn鈥檛 read computer screens. It鈥檚 not an unusual problem for older people, which is why you might think Oracle Cerner, the developers of the agency鈥檚 new digital health record system, would have anticipated it. But they didn鈥檛. (Tahir, 10/20)
Black patients were less likely to be referred for and receive heart pumps and transplants than white patients, according to a new study. It's another sign of systemic bias within the health system that could limit access to lifesaving care for vulnerable populations. (Dreher, 10/19)
In other health care industry news 鈥
The National Plan for Health Workforce Well-Being, released Wednesday, details the need for healthcare leaders, insurers, educators and government agencies to work together to reduce administrative burdens and the strain healthcare workers face on the job. (Devereaux, 10/19)
Sutter Health has agreed to pay more than $13 million to settle allegations of improper billing practices, according to the U.S. Attorney鈥檚 Office in the Northern District of California. (Hudson, 10/19)
In 2018, the researcher Pranav Rajpurkar was working on an algorithm that could find blood clots in patients鈥 legs from ultrasound images. It spotted them very well, but when he went looking for what the algorithm had picked up on in the images to make its predictions, he saw it had been cheating: it was looking at the metadata in the top right corner of every ultrasound. (Williamson-Lee, 10/20)
KHN: Family Caregivers Find Support On #Dementia TikTok
It all changed on a Saturday night in New York City in 2016. Jacquelyn Revere was 29 and headed out to attend a friend鈥檚 comedy show. She was on the subway when her phone rang. It was a friend of her mom鈥檚, back in Los Angeles. That鈥檚 weird, Revere thought. She never calls. 鈥淎nd while I was on the subway, my mom鈥檚 friend said, 鈥楽omething is wrong with your mom,鈥欌 Revere said. 鈥溾榃e don鈥檛 know what鈥檚 going on, but your mom got lost driving home. What should have been a 15-minute drive ended up taking two hours.鈥欌 (Wells, 10/20)