Are you focused on your everyday, regular work? We’re struggling with so many distracting and terrible things going on in the world. It is also tough to concentrate on impossibly boring reports, even if they’re important. We will try to make it interesting for you today. Actually, we always try to do that. If you haven’t already, you should sign up for MyMaverick here — and at least health IT policy will be one everyday thing you can manage without wanting to stick a fork in your eye (there is a song about sticking a fork in your eye, believe it or not). In the One Thoughtful Paragraph, we explain how everyday things in the health IT world can make our human experience better.
Other things that may change everyday health care things for the better:
- A new app called Thoughtful gives you a little personality test and then some advice to help address loneliness — the founders raised $7M in seed funding to get it off the ground. And our not-a-startup corporate friend Apple is offering users of iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches to log emotions, complete mental health assessments, and understand their risk of depression and anxiety.
- The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) awarded $3.5M to Belle.ai and Urban Health Plan to develop an AI-powered solution that enables providers to remotely examine children with skin, ear, and throat conditions. We thought TytoCare was already doing that sort of thing, but the more kids and parents that don’t have to go to the doctor to get well, the better.
- To make sure all of these consumer-facing health and wellness ideas don’t cause more harm than good, the FDA is launching a new Digital Health Advisory committee full of science and tech experts that will be operational in 2024. The committee will look at the benefits, risks and clinical outcomes associated with digital health medical devices like wearables, remote patient monitoring, healthcare-related virtual reality tools, and AI-related things.
When we get distracted from our regular, everyday work, an old song goes through our head: “Love the One You’re With.” Stephen Stills of Crosby, Stills & Nash fame created these great lyrics: “If you’re down and confused, And you don’t remember who you’re talkin’ to, Concentration slip away, Because your baby is so far away . . . if you can’t be with the one you love, honey, Love the one you’re with.” So that is supposed to be lighter than we are making it out to be, but sometimes we use it as our jam to get back to business. Today’s business is the latest report from the federal government on patients’ use of portals and online apps. We admit, it is a total snoozefest. But this stat caught our eye: “In 2022, 73% of individuals reported being offered online access to their medical records by their health care provider or insurer— a 24% increase from 2020—and 57% accessed their online medical records or patient portal at least once in the past year—a 50% increase from 2020.” This is a very big deal. It is like how back in the 1980s there were weird little cameras that you had to bring to a shop to get the film developed so you could six smeary pictures of a birthday party, but then two years after the iPhone introduced handheld digital cameras, everyone had all their beautiful pictures immediately and available all the time. We are actually in this early iPhone camera phase now with online access to medical information. So, at least we have that going for us, while we try not to think about the spooky symbolism of Americans-bringing-the-world peace in Stills’ lyrics: And there’s a rose in a fisted glove And the eagle flies with the dove.
