By Shailin Thomas Recently, the House of Representatives voted on and passed the ADA Education and Reform Act of 2017 — an update to the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (42 U.S.C. § 12101 et seq.). The bill changes the process by which private citizens with disabilities and disabling medical conditions can bring lawsuits…
Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest illnesses out there. The five-year survival rate of patients with the disease is only about 7%. This is, in part, because few observable symptoms appear early enough for effective treatment. As a result, by the time many patients are diagnosed the prognosis is poor. There is an app,…
By Shailin Thomas Earlier this summer, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania ruled that a physician cannot delegate obtaining informed consent from a patient to a member of her staff. In Shinal v. Toms, a neurosurgeon perforated a patient’s cranial artery while resecting a tumor, which led to hemorrhaging, brain damage, and partial blindness. The patient alleged…
Earlier this month, the FDA announced that it is asking Endo Pharmaceuticals to remove the opioid Opana ER from the market. Opana ER is an extended-release pain reliever often abused by those who take it. While opioid abuse is nothing new, and many opioids leave those who take them addicted to narcotics or heroin, Opana ER…
By Shailin Thomas In 2016, Facebook unveiled a new tool that allows users to post live streams of video directly from their phones to the social media platform. This feature — known as “Facebook Live” — allows friends and followers to watch a user’s videos as she films them. Originally conceptualized as a means of…
By Shailin Thomas Medicare Advantage was introduced as a mechanism for capturing some of the oft-extolled efficiencies of the private health insurance market. Instead of paying providers for services directly, as in traditional Medicare, the government pays Medicare Advantage insurers a predetermined, risk-adjusted amount of money per patient to cover all medical expenses for the year….
By Shailin Thomas Recently, I wrote about the rise of artificial intelligence in medical decision-making and its potential impacts on medical malpractice. I posited that, by decreasing the degree of discretion physicians exercise in diagnosis and treatment, medical algorithms could reduce the viability of negligence claims against health care providers. It’s easy to see why artificial…
By Shailin Thomas Artificial intelligence and machine-learning algorithms are the centerpieces of many exciting technologies currently in development. From self-driving Teslas to in-home assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa or Google Home, AI is swiftly becoming the hot new focus of the tech industry. Even those outside Silicon Valley have taken notice — Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and…
By Shailin Thomas For-profit hospitals have taken their fair share of flack over the years. Much maligned by many in the medical community, they are seen as money-hungry corporate machines that pervert the medical profession by putting the bottom line before patient care. This skepticism of profit-driven hospitals feels right. Medicine has long been the purview of charitable organizations…
By Shailin Thomas As the health care community waits with bated breath to see what will become of the Affordable Care Act under the Trump administration, Republicans in Congress have set their sites on another health-related initiative that has been on their wish list for years: reforming Medicare. While Trump promised throughout his campaign not to…
