Morning Ed: Health {2018.07.23.M}
[He1] Nurse practitioners are helping to fill some gaps in ruralia.
[He2] An alternative will be telemedicine, which has potential but will probably require desperation before it takes of. My wife actually has a non-compete that would more or less prevent her from doing telemedicine for another part of the country as long as she is broadcasting within a 30 mile radius of where we are now.
[He3] Between obesity and Alzheimer’s, it’s interesting to think what we’d never guess might be caused by viruses and bacteria.
[He4] Urban bias among physicians is not strictly an American problem. In fact, in India it might be an even bigger one. A look at rural healthcare in India.
[He5] An argument for diversity and/or affirmative action: With black patients, black doctors may be better doctors simply for being black.
[He6] Well, it will still have the benefit of preventing me from now being able to move my shoulders without feeling great pain.
[He7] It’s really disappointing that they haven’t found someone to take over this work. I hope some foundation or consortium manages to do so.
[He8] We should eliminate them as best we can, but medical errors will always be with us.
[He9] Scott Alexander looks at melatonin. My problem is that I really need the 10mg and there’s not much that can contradict my experience here.
[He1] and [He2] have some overlap. It’s not just NP that are expanding, PA’s are increasing at a huge rate, and specializing into various fields. MY VA primary care provider has been a PA for several years now, and most of the front line care givers are NP when going for routine care. It’s not just the cost savings of a PA/NP over a doctor, but also due to absurd levels of DR shortages.
One area that I have personally seen telemedicine already employed is wellness and mental health care. The VA system here has two rooms at the mental health clinic dedicated and wired for telehealth, everything from various therapies with a provider to things like mindfulness classes, even yoga, and distance consults. It seems like a natural fit for rural areas to embrace telemedicine, but I can see and understand the wariness of some, especially elderly who are likely to be a large segment of rural health care, to warm to it.Report
[He2} (#Bannoncompetes)
(huh, that hashtag can be parsed a couple different ways)Report
He7 Shame yes, very much. But the very valuable well used thing cost 1.2 million dollars. Budget cuts my butt. They couldn’t find 1.2 million for that because they didn’t want to. They couldn’t find some foundation or Uni to take it over??? I find it extremely hard to believe they even tried.
It’s going away because they ( donors) want it gone.Report
He2: As part of our family health insurance adventure this year, we’ve returned to getting our care through Kaiser Permanente of Colorado. Kaiser now supports video visits with either your regular doc or an urgent care doc without copays. One of the sequences from the “how it works” publicity video includes a man with a nasty rash on his arm showing the rash to the doc using his smart phone, who decides that it should be seen but doesn’t require an ER visit, and schedules an appointment for the member for late that afternoon.
Granted, Kaiser is limited to the Front Range urban corridor where high-speed data is widely available. As a side note, Kaiser seems to get a lot more out of their EMR and other software systems than our previous provider, also a large multi-location practice.Report