Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Glitch With Diabetes Monitors Drives Home Dangers Of Depending On Technology
Stat: A Glitch In Diabetes Monitors Serves As A Cautionary Tale For Health Tech
Here’s the challenge for technology in health care: Success means that new tech also becomes too indispensable to fail. You can deal with Twitter being down, but not the loss of a device that keeps your kid’s blood sugar at safe levels. That message was driven home in recent days by Dexcom, a San Diego company that makes sensors used by people with diabetes to measure their blood sugar. The company has been one of the biggest success stories in applying technology to health. Sales of its continuous glucose monitors climbed to $396 million in the third quarter of 2019, up 49% from a year ago. (Herper, 12/3)
In other health and technology news —
KCUR: Mental Health Care Dominates Growing Missouri Telemedicine Field
More people in Missouri are consulting doctors via telephone or video services — and mental health care is most in demand. Patient visits using telephones or video conferencing systems have increased tenfold since 2010 among Missouri Medicaid users, according to the Missouri Telehealth Network at the University of Missouri. The vast majority of those visits were for behavioral or mental health services, said Rachel Mutrux, senior program director at the network. (12/2)
Modern Healthcare: Amazon Launches Medical Transcription Service
Amazon on Monday unveiled Transcribe Medical, a medical transcription service the tech giant said is designed to make clinical documentation more efficient. Cerner Corp., which entered into a cloud collaboration with Amazon this summer, has already signed on as a customer of the new machine-learning service. Cerner is using Transcribe Medical to develop a digital voice scribe that can "listen" in the background during a patient's visit and transcribe physician-patient conversations into text. (Cohen, 12/2)
