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New York City resident Jeanne Jennings was so sick with COVID-19 she couldn’t draw a decent breath. “Even going from my bed to the bathroom was such a difficult task, I felt like I was going to pass out,” Jennings, 46, said. Jennings wanted to go to the hospital, but this was early May, the height of the Big Apple’s COVID-19 crisis, and over the phone her doctor laid out the situation in stark terms. “She said, ‘There’s no guarantee they would have a place for you because they’re reserving hospital space for the more serious patients. If you do stay there, you’re going to be isolated from your family. You won’t really have the freedom to move around all that much,’” Jennings recalled. Jennings added that the doctor said, “‘Would you be open to me treating you via telemedicine?’ I said, ‘Sure.’” The revival of the doctor’s house call — or, at least, a modern-day version — is one of many innovations undertaken by doctors and hospital staff struggling to keep up with surges in COVID-19 cases. Jennings’ hospital, Northwell Health, immediately sent two nurses to her home, clad head-to-toe in protective gear. One nurse monitored her condition for a few hours, while the other took blood work that would confirm her COVID-19 diagnosis. A pulse oximeter brought by the first nurse revealed that… read on >

Telemedicine has exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the United States on track to log more than 1 billion virtual doctor visits by the end of 2020, experts say. But how important will telemedicine remain to U.S. health care after the pandemic becomes just a bad memory? These sort of technology-based visits are expected to assume a permanent place moving forward, said Dr. Ateev Mehrotra, an associate professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School, during a HealthDay Live! interview. “The genie’s out of the bottle. We can’t go back,” Mehrotra said, noting that debate now centers around how much to pay for different types of telemedicine visits. Mehrotra said the growth of telemedicine this year was “really remarkable,” particularly given that the practice of providing care via computer or telephone has been around for decades without much growth. “In the course of the pandemic, the growth was just staggering,” Mehrotra said. “Changes we would have expected over a decade happened within a week or two. “All of a sudden, it became something that went from being the future to being the reality of how a lot of Americans were getting care,” he added. Telemedicine was new to Dr. Rujuta Saksena, a cancer doctor at Overlook Medical Center in Summit, N.J. She’d never before tried to work with patients over a video feed. “I… read on >

The coronavirus pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement have prompted some Americans to take a break from social media, new research finds. The national survey by Ohio State Wexner Medical Center of 2,000 people found that 56% changed their social media habits because of tensions brought on by current U.S. events. While 29% said their social media use increased because of these tensions, 20% said they had taken breaks from social media. “Stepping away and reconnecting with reality offline is an important step to take for your mental health,” said Ken Yeager, director of the Stress, Trauma and Resilience Program at the medical center. “Being constantly immersed in this stressful environment and being overexposed to contentious or traumatic events can make you feel like the world is a less safe place to be,” Yeager said in a center news release. “And because these stressors have persisted over a long period of time, it’s wearing on people’s ability to cope with that stress.” The stress resulting from these events has increased depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts and behaviors, and substance abuse, Yeager added. “Even though you can’t control what happens on social media, it’s important to recognize how it may affect you and take steps to limit your exposure,” Yeager said. These tips can help: Get off the internet and stop scrolling social media. Instead, reconnect… read on >

Since the coronavirus pandemic began, nearly 50% of Americans have used technology to communicate with their doctors, a new study finds. But less than one-quarter have talked with their doctors about using health information technology, the researchers found. “The results of our statewide survey indicate patients are using health information technology,” said researcher Joy Lee, a scientist at the Regenstrief Institute in Indianapolis. “However, they aren’t talking to their provider about it,” she added. “One of the few widely agreed upon recommendations for electronic communication in health care is for providers to be talking to their patients about it ahead of time. This does not appear to be happening regularly, and may be impacting the use of this technology.” The coronavirus pandemic has changed how patients are communicating with their doctors, Lee said. “But having a shared agenda about how to communicate, what is appropriate to send as a message, and being able to discuss it openly is still important to foster the electronic patient-provider relationship,” she said in an institute news release. Results of a survey sent to Indiana residents found that: 31% use electronic health record messaging 24% use email 18% use text messages These findings are similar to findings across the United States, the researchers noted. But only 21% of participants said they had a conversation with their doctor about how to… read on >

The COVID-19 pandemic is shaking up America’s approach to addiction treatment, but the fallout hasn’t been all bad, experts say. In-person support meetings either aren’t happening or have been severely curtailed, and addiction centers are facing financial ruin because folks are too afraid of the coronavirus to seek treatment. But paradoxically, people might have better access to addiction treatment than ever before, thanks to the shift to telemedicine across all health care. “Ultimately, I think this will rebound, but not like before,” Fred Muench, president of the Partnership to End Addiction, said of the future of addiction treatment. Muench sees telemedicine as the way to ensure the financial survival of the U.S. network of addiction providers. “We will see the greatest changes in outpatient care, which will truly be a hybrid,” Muench said. “In the future, you will not have to be a telehealth provider to treat digitally — all treatment will have a telehealth component. If not, it will cease to exist. Providers cannot afford to wait to integrate telehealth.” COVID-19 lockdowns forced organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous to shift to web video meetings or teleconferences for their support groups. The pandemic also caused many treatment centers to cut back on their services. More than nine out of 10 addiction centers said they cut back their programs during the lockdown, furloughing or laying off employees,… read on >

Both cyberbullies and their victims can suffer from symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a new British study finds. Cyberbullying is bullying online rather than in person. It’s so pervasive that pediatricians should routinely ask their patients about it as part of psychological assessment, the researchers said. “Parents, teachers and health professionals need to be aware of possible PTSD symptoms in young people involved in cyberbullying,” said study author Ana Pascual-Sánchez and colleagues. She’s in the psychiatry division at Imperial College London. Cyberbullying among teenagers is estimated to range from 10% to 40%, said the researchers. Because it can be done anonymously day or night, it poses special risks, they noted. For the study, Pascual-Sánchez and her team collected data on more than 2,200 11- to 19-year-olds from four London schools who were surveyed about their experiences. The survey found that 46% had a history of any kind of bullying: 17% were victims; 12% were perpetrators; and 4% were both. Traditional bullying was more common than cyberbullying, the researchers found. Still, about 13% of the teens had been cyberbullied; 8.5% had bullied others online; and 4% had been both victims and perpetrators. About 16% of the kids had been bullied in person; 12% had bullied others in person; and 7% had been both victims and perpetrators, the researchers found. There was some overlap between types… read on >

Streaks of color swirl through a pulsing, black-and-white image of a patient’s heart. They represent blood, and they’re color-coded based on speed: turquoise and green for the fastest flow, yellow and red for the slowest. This real-time video, which can be rotated and viewed from any angle, allows doctors to spot problems like a leaky heart valve or a failing surgical repair with unprecedented speed. And artificial intelligence (AI) imaging technology made it possible. “It’s quite simple, it’s like a video game,” said Dr. Albert Hsiao, an associate professor of radiology at the University of California, San Diego, who developed the technology while a medical resident at Stanford University. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes to support this simplicity. Each 10-minute scan produces 2 to 10 gigabytes of data. To handle such huge, complicated data sets, Hsiao and his colleagues at Arterys, the company he helped found in 2012 to develop the technology, decided to build the infrastructure on the internet, where it can be accessed by servers from other researchers. And now, investigators around the world are using this cloud-based infrastructure to share and test medical AI imaging models in the Arterys Marketplace. “We’ve made it almost as easy to get medical AI online as to upload a YouTube video,” said Arterys product strategy manager Christian Ulstrup. Arterys decided to open up… read on >

Back before coronavirus took over the headlines, every week seemed to bring another report about artificial intelligence besting human doctors at everything from diagnosing skin cancer to spotting pneumonia on chest X-rays. But these artificial intelligence (AI) tools — computer programs that get better at performing a task by being “trained” on the right kind of data — are years away from being used to help diagnose real-life patients, according to the doctors helping to develop and test them. “We still have a lot of unknowns in terms of generalizing and validation of these systems before we can start using them as standard of care,” said Dr. Matthew Hanna, a pathologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Generalizing means building an AI tool that can be used in multiple hospitals, and validation involves testing and adjusting an AI tool to ensure it’s accurate. “These are the types of studies we need to do to make sure these models are performing properly and not potentially harming patients,” Hanna explained. Meanwhile, humans are in no rush to swap their doctor for an AI diagnosis. In a 2019 New York University-Harvard study, business school students said they’d be OK with getting poorer quality health care as long as it was provided by a human instead of AI. People resisted AI, the study authors found,… read on >

Bright yellow and looking like a headless deer, Spot can travel across ground too risky for humans. “Built for dirt and danger,” in the words of its maker Boston Dynamics, this robot is now helping humans battle a different threat: the spread of coronavirus. Equipped with an iPad and two-way radio, Spot has been making the rounds at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston since April. Medical technicians use the robot to interview patients with suspected COVID-19 remotely, with no need to don personal protective equipment. Think of it as mobile telemedicine. Then there’s computer programs that pore through mountains of information to pluck out and analyze the relevant bits to help find a promising drug for COVID-19 after just two days’ work. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are tackling the pandemic on every front: Robots that blast surfaces with high-power ultraviolet light are decontaminating hospitals around the world. Robots also stepped in to help Chinese hospitals cope with coronavirus, checking visitors’ temperatures, delivering food and medicine, keeping isolated wards clean and even offering a little entertainment. Medical robots can go where human doctors can’t, and process information much faster. But scientists are still only in the very early stages of using AI to treat patients. “There’s still a big gap between this kind of research and the clinical applications,” said Steve Jiang, a professor at… read on >