Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Patients With Disabilities? No Thanks, Say Some Doctors
The New York Times: These Doctors Admit They Don’t Want Patients With Disabilities
The doctors also explained why they could be so eager to get rid of these patients, focusing on the shrinking amount of time doctors are allotted to spend with individual patients. “Seeing patients at a 15-minute clip is absolutely ridiculous,” one doctor said. “To have someone say, ‘Well we’re still going to see those patients with mild to moderate disability in those time frames’ — it’s just unreasonable and it’s unacceptable to me.” (Kolata, 10/19)
Read More On The Research In Health Affairs: ‘I Am Not The Doctor For You’: Physicians’ Attitudes About Caring For People With Disabilities
Also —
KHN: Blind To Problems: How VA’s Electronic Record System Shuts Out Visually Impaired Patients
Sarah Sheffield, a nurse practitioner at a Veterans Affairs clinic in Eugene, Oregon, had a problem. Her patients — mostly in their 70s and beyond — couldn’t read computer screens. It’s not an unusual problem for older people, which is why you might think Oracle Cerner, the developers of the agency’s new digital health record system, would have anticipated it. But they didn’t. (Tahir, 10/20)
Axios: Cardiac Care Is Affected By Provider Racism, Study Finds
Black patients were less likely to be referred for and receive heart pumps and transplants than white patients, according to a new study. It's another sign of systemic bias within the health system that could limit access to lifesaving care for vulnerable populations. (Dreher, 10/19)
In other health care industry news —
Modern Healthcare: National Academy Of Medicine Issues Report On Health Worker Burnout
The National Plan for Health Workforce Well-Being, released Wednesday, details the need for healthcare leaders, insurers, educators and government agencies to work together to reduce administrative burdens and the strain healthcare workers face on the job. (Devereaux, 10/19)
Modern Healthcare: Sutter Health Agrees To Settlement For Lab Test Billing
Sutter Health has agreed to pay more than $13 million to settle allegations of improper billing practices, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of California. (Hudson, 10/19)
Stat: Growth Of AI In Medical Image Analysis Raises Concerns About Trust
In 2018, the researcher Pranav Rajpurkar was working on an algorithm that could find blood clots in patients’ legs from ultrasound images. It spotted them very well, but when he went looking for what the algorithm had picked up on in the images to make its predictions, he saw it had been cheating: it was looking at the metadata in the top right corner of every ultrasound. (Williamson-Lee, 10/20)
KHN: Family Caregivers Find Support On #Dementia TikTok
It all changed on a Saturday night in New York City in 2016. Jacquelyn Revere was 29 and headed out to attend a friend’s comedy show. She was on the subway when her phone rang. It was a friend of her mom’s, back in Los Angeles. That’s weird, Revere thought. She never calls. “And while I was on the subway, my mom’s friend said, ‘Something is wrong with your mom,’” Revere said. “‘We don’t know what’s going on, but your mom got lost driving home. What should have been a 15-minute drive ended up taking two hours.’” (Wells, 10/20)
