Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Longer Looks: Interesting Reads You Might Have Missed
The Washington Post: Your Therapy Session Could End Up On TikTok
Patients share their deepest fears and darkest secrets within the safe confines of a therapist’s office. And increasingly, therapists are sharing versions of those stories with millions on TikTok. As social media plays an ever-more-central role in society, therapists have taken to online spaces to discuss mental health issues. Many of them share video vignettes that reenact conversations with clients. As a result, more patients are being asked to sign social media consent forms that allow therapists to use behind-closed-door revelations to inspire online content. (Javaid, 3/10)
The New York Times: Aggressive Medical Care Remains Common At Life’s End
Although studies repeatedly show that most patients want to die at home, 25 percent of the community dwellers and almost 40 percent of the nursing home residents died in hospitals. Hospice leaders, palliative care specialists, health care reformers and advocacy groups have worked for years to try to lower such numbers. “Patients who received this type of aggressive care experience more pain, actually die sooner, have a much poorer quality of life at the end. And their families experience more doubt and trauma,” said Dr. Sara Douglas, a co-author and oncology researcher at the Case Western Reserve University School of Nursing. (Span, 3/14)
The Washington Post: Orthopedic Surgeon Felicity Fishman Draws Art On Her Patients' Casts
Her patients often save their casts, which are decorated by Chicago pediatric orthopedic surgeon Felicity Fishman. “If they can look at my drawing and remember a positive experience, that’s wonderful to me,” she said. “Anything you can do to connect with a child during the course of a surgery is helpful in maintaining that relationship.” (Free, 3/16)
The Wall Street Journal: If We Knew Then What We Know Now About Covid, What Would We Have Done Differently?
How easy it is to forget those first nightmarish months of the pandemic. Epidemiologists, doctors and scientists haven’t forgotten, though. Those who spent time on the pandemic’s front lines have since asked themselves: What have we learned? What do we now know about Covid-19 that we didn’t know at the start of the pandemic, and what would we have done differently had we known? Answering those questions about this pandemic, they hope, will help us better manage the next one. (Morris, 3/11)
AP: Not Magic: Opaque AI Tool May Flag Parents With Disabilities
Over the past six years, Allegheny County has served as a real-world laboratory for testing AI-driven child welfare tools that crunch reams of data about local families to try to predict which children are likely to face danger in their homes. Today, child welfare agencies in at least 26 states and Washington, D.C., have considered using algorithmic tools, and jurisdictions in at least 11 have deployed them, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. (Ho and Burke, 3/15)
The Wall Street Journal: The American Diet Has A Sandwich Problem
Sandwiches are the number one source of sodium and saturated fat in Americans’ diets, making up about one-fifth of our daily sodium intake and 19% of our daily saturated fat calories, according to an analysis of federal survey data. Sandwiches contribute 7% of daily added sugars, the same percentage as breakfast cereals and bars. “The standard deli sandwich with processed meat and cheese, you’re literally eating a heart bomb,” says Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and professor of nutrition and medicine at Tufts University. (Petersen, 3/14)
Also —
The Wall Street Journal: Doctor-Rating Websites Lack Convictions And Medical Malpractice Claims Against Some Physicians
An Indiana doctor has top marks on several physician-review sites, with one patient writing that the doctor was the best she had seen in years. The site, however, is missing some key information—including his conviction for insurance fraud, medical-malpractice claims and a licensing-board sanction. Doctor-rating websites regularly fail to mention such black marks on physicians’ records, according to research published in November in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. (Wernau, 3/10)
The Wall Street Journal: Why Hospitals Still Make Serious Medical Errors—And How They Are Trying To Reduce Them
Hospitals are turning to technology to address one of the most intractable risks their patients face: medical errors. More than two decades after the launch of a national patient-safety movement to tackle the alarming toll of medical mistakes, preventing those errors has proved much harder than expected. Despite research that shows some improvement over time, hospitalized patients are still at substantial risk of medication mishaps, hospital infections, breakdowns in nursing care, and complications from surgery and other procedures. (Landro, 3/12)
