Category: Technology
Online harassment is silencing Canada’s health experts — institutions need to do more to protect them
While academics should be comfortable having their ideas challenged, technology-facilitated harassment is very different. Online harassment is often linked with other forms of targeted abuse and includes acts of doxxing, reputation attacks or threatening and sexualized messaging, among others.
AI vs. AI: Patients deploy bots to battle health insurers that deny care
Several businesses and nonprofits have launched AI-powered tools to help patients get their insurance claims paid and navigate byzantine medical bills, creating a robotic tug-of-war over who gets care and who foots the bill for it.
Stethoscope, meet AI – helping doctors hear hidden sounds to better diagnose disease
AI technology can identify the hidden differences in the sounds of healthy and damaged hearts and use them to diagnose disease before traditional acoustic changes like murmurs even appear. Instead of relying on the presence of extra or abnormal sounds to diagnose disease, AI can detect differences in sound that are too faint or subtle for the human ear to detect.
An AI Assistant Can Interpret Those Lab Results for You
Many patients are using large language models, or LLMs, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini, to interpret their records. That help comes with some risk, though.
Online therapy as effective as in-person therapy, finds large study
We aren’t certain why remote care works, but one reason might be that the most important aspects of good therapy – things like building trust between patient and therapist, using evidence-based treatments and regular follow-up – can still occur online. In fact, for some people, meeting by video can make it easier to show up and feel comfortable.
How artificial intelligence controls your health insurance coverage
Unlike doctors and hospitals, which use AI to help diagnose and treat patients, health insurers use these algorithms to decide whether to pay for health care treatments and services that are recommended by a physician.
Wearable fitness trackers can make you seven times more likely to stick to your workouts – new research
Using wearables (such as a smartwatch) not only makes people more likely to start working out, they’re also seven times more likely to still be active after six months compared to those who didn’t use a smartwatch.
Rural Hospitals and Patients Are Disconnected From Modern Care
Counties without fast, reliable internet and with shortages of health care providers are mostly rural. Nearly 60% of them have no hospital.
Telehealth abortion still on the rise, especially in states with shield laws, report shows
From January to March 2024, there were about 19,700 telehealth abortions per month, according to the report. The states with the biggest jumps in the average number of abortions per month compared with the first three months of 2023 include New York, California, Virginia, Kansas and Pennsylvania. Kansas saw 59% more telehealth abortions and 29% more in-person abortions each month.
The design and marketing of mental health chatbots may result in users’ misconceptions about their therapeutic value.
AI inconsistently assesses cardiac risk from chest pain – UW study finds
Tasked to interpret data associated with patient complaints of nontraumatic chest pain, the ChatGPT-4 large language model performed poorly against two standard tools that doctors use to predict risk of a cardiac event.
Increasingly sophisticated AI systems can perform empathy, but their use in mental health care raises ethical questions
Some examples of AI applications include: screening tools in primary care settings, enhanced tele-therapy sessions and chatbots offering accessible 24/7 emotional support. These can act as bridges for anyone waiting for professional help and those hesitant to seek traditional therapy. However, this turn to emotion-AI comes with a host of ethical, social and regulatory challenges around consent, transparency, liability and data security.
Beware online mental health chatbots, UW specialists warn
AI chatbots may someday play an important role in mental health care, but many currently online are untested and unsafe.
Telehealth makes timely abortions possible for many, research shows
Access to telehealth abortion care can determine whether a person can obtain an abortion in the United States. For young people and those living on low incomes, telehealth makes a critical difference in getting timely abortion care.
Health misinformation is rampant on social media – here’s what it does, why it spreads and what people can do about it
Studies show that health misinformation spread on social media results in fewer people getting vaccinated and can also increase the risk of other health dangers such as disordered eating and unsafe sex practices and sexually transmitted infections. Health misinformation has even bled over into animal health, with a 2023 study finding that 53% of dog owners surveyed in a nationally representative sample report being skeptical of pet vaccines.