By BRIAN JOONDEPH Image created by/using ChatGPT Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming a core part of healthcare operations. It drafts clinical notes, summarizes patient visits, flags abnormal labs, triages messages, reviews imaging, helps with prior authorizations, and increasingly guides decision support. AI is no longer just a side experiment in medicine; it is becoming a…
Treating serious mental illness is not just a good thing to do for altruistic reasons. It also can improve health outcomes and reduce cost for those with comorbid physical conditions as well. Vincent Joralemon writes in Health Affairs Forefront regarding this issue. The article quotes Sherry Rais, CEO of Enthea: Ten percent of patients drive…
It was a snowy afternoon in Bozeman, a city of nearly 60,000 nestled among the mountains of southern Montana. Temperatures hovered in the mid-30s. The city’s mobile crisis team had just gotten a call about a man walking around outside without shoes. The man’s family told the team he was having a mental health crisis…
In the final days of 2025, governors around the country trumpeted the hundreds of millions of federal dollars they won from a new, $50 billion rural health fund. But plans to spend those nine-digit awards aren’t all warmly received. At least one group of Republican state lawmakers appears to have scuttled an initiative preapproved by…
As reported by Kaiser Health News: The value of drugmakers’ copay cards has become more unpredictable as insurers try to restrict their use. Many insurance plans, for instance, do not count the money from a copay program toward a patient’s deductible.And patients who use a copay card can wind up paying full or nearly full price…
Oren Nissim is the CEO of Brook-ai which is been making some waves in the remote care space. Their goals is to use remote patient monitoring to help providers reduce readmissions, and help patients stay on their care plans. For example they get more then 50% of their populations into hypertension control within 10 weeks,…
Samantha Smith, de Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, entró al quirófano para la extracción de emergencia de un embarazo ectópico. “Estoy agradecida de no haber muerto”, dijo, pero se sorprendió al ver que la cirugía ambulatoria fue facturada a su aseguradora por unos $100.000. Jamie Estrada, de Albuquerque, Nuevo México, recibió en dos ocasiones inyecciones de lidocaína en…
Letters to the Editor is a periodic feature. We welcome all comments and will publish a selection. We edit for length and clarity and require full names. We Have Invested Too Much To Let Research Programs Die Quietly I have dedicated my life to research, but now that work, along with the trust, data, and progress behind it,…
Tighter regulations and an influx of federal money in recent years have helped communities across the U.S. initiate efforts to clean up lead contamination in soil, drinking water, and older homes. But Congress and the Trump administration have partially rolled back those rules and resources, potentially making it more challenging for cash-strapped cities and towns…
Samantha Smith of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, went into the operating room for emergency removal of an ectopic pregnancy. “I’m grateful I didn’t die,” she said, but she was shocked to see that the outpatient surgery was billed to her insurer for about $100,000. Jamie Estrada of Albuquerque, New Mexico, twice received injections of lidocaine in his…