Cellphones and Medicine

What’s one thing that nearly all patients have with them when they come to the office?  Aside from the need for expert medical advice, most patients also have a cellphone.  Why is this important?  Advances in medical technology have made it possible to use a cellphone to do things like take an EKG or check your glucose, without the pain of having a needle stick.  These are just a couple of things that Dr. Eric Topol, chief academic officer for Scripps Health, talked about with Dr. Nancy Sniderman on NBC’s Rock Center with Brian Williams.   It’s interesting that a 17-year-old girl actually developed the program for taking EKGs over a cellphone.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO means search engine optimization.  As doctors, we don't usually think about this much.  Search engines, however, are how many patients find us these days.  In other words, if we have web pages, we have to know how to optimize them.  That way patients can quickly find and search our pages to get the information they need.  Hopefully coming back to us again in the future.

That being said, many of us in the medical world don’t want to think about search engines.  That’s understandable, we would much rather spend our time healing patients than worrying about how they found us.  There are a few simple things we should consider, however, in putting together our web pages.  Things like key words and image descriptions can be very important in steering patients to and through our websites.  In Business Insider Magazine you can find a short list of things to consider as you seek to build or improve upon your website.

HIV Cure?

The National Institutes of health has published a statement saying that a two-year-old child, born to a mother with the AIDS causing HIV virus and testing positive for the virus itself, is now off medication.  How did this happen?  What implication does this have for future treatment of HIV infected newborns?  First off, lets be clear, being off medication is not the same thing as being cured.  The child, whose sex has not been released, has undetectable levels of virus using standard tests.  However, more sophisticated test still show that the virus remains.  The amount of virus is very low, and it is not replicating at this point. 

The theory is that this “functional” cure occurred because the child could be treated so quickly.  He or she received the first doses of antiretroviral medication (the HIV virus is a retrovirus) approximately 30 hours after it was born.  Thus preventing the virus from firmly establishing itself in its host’s cells.

The bottom line, in my opinion, is that this is a functional, not an absolute, cure.  It is certainly not impossible that in the future this child may need to be put back on antiretroviral therapy.  However, in the meantime at least, he or she does not have to be medicated and can go on living a normal life.

Sequestration

If you look anywhere in the news these days your bound to find something about sequestration.  In this case sequestration refers to budget cuts that were just put in place this month.  The cuts, however, were planned in the Budget Control Act of 2011.  The government spends tax dollars on many industries, but healthcare is one of the major players in this cut, taking up 3.6% of the GDP (Wikipedia: Medicare (US)). 

So how will sequestration affect healthcare?  In a study done by Tipp Ubach, a firm that specializes in economic impact studies, it was found that sequestration could cost us 766,000 healthcare related jobs by 2021.  Both directly and indirectly the healthcare industry and it’s supporters are going to be hit by the spending cuts.

I hope this study overestimates the effect sequestration will have.  I imagine we’ll see some job loss but we will also see some healthcare business adaptations. Doctors and patients will be on the frontlines as the healthcare spending cuts roll out, I hope they won’t be disappointed.