Diagnosis is a classification task: a patient has symptoms, the symptoms map to a list of possible conditions, the clinician selects the best label. This is an appealingly simple way to define how medicine works and in many cases, it’s good enough. In others, quite inadequate. Diagnosis can be straightforward – when the patient presents …
Insights from Scandinavia for better, safer hospitals External inspection for quality seems straightforward: set standards, assess hospitals against them, then performance should improve. But three Scandinavian countries – Denmark, Norway and Sweden – show a divergence of philosophies and practices behind that idea. Norway’s DNV model applies systems-oriented, ISO-based accreditation internationally. Denmark ended its national …
If a treatment came along that reduced surgical complications by up to 30%, lowered error rates, and decreased mortality, while also reducing burnout, depression and staff turnover, we would rush to adopt it. If it was simple, cheap and without side-effects, its popularity might rival the latest GLP-1 agonist. The “treatment” actually exists but isn’t …
A HIDden free treatment that improves outcomes for patients and staff Read More »
Human + AI: Winning Team? In 2009, Charles Friedman articulated what he called the “Fundamental Theorem of Informatics”: a person working in partnership with an information resource is better than that same person unassisted. For decades, this has been a bedrock principle of biomedical informatics. It’s a simple idea: computers augment human capability. A calculator …
More than 25 years after the modern “quality movement” took off, healthcare is still not as safe as we want it to be. Checklists, protocols and investigations have helped, but improvement has slowed while care has become more complex. Medical teams work in settings where conditions often shift rapidly, the margin for error is slim, …
Basketball, rugby, football and Ted Lasso: lessons from sport for safety in healthcare Read More »
Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) capture how people experience illness, treatment and day-to-day health. As artificial intelligence (AI) evolves, generative AI tools offer new ways of gathering and interpreting this information. A recent paper (Boyer et al, npj Digital Medicine. 2025) highlights both the limitations of current approaches and the possible contribution of AI. These ideas are …
Rethinking Patient-Reported Outcomes in the age of generative AI Read More »
Read an edited and updated (March 18, 2024) version of this article here, on Insight Health Solutions – https://www.insight.co.za Do Google Gemini’s claims match their ambitious aims? Measuring human intelligence (“IQ”) is challenging, even controversial. As we enter the age of artificial intelligence (AI), in healthcare and everything else, how will we measure the “IQ …
America spends an enormous amount (nearly 18% of GDP) on health care. Total US health care spend (2022): $4.5 trillion! [$1 trillion is 1,000,000,000,000 dollars] Per capita spend (2022): $13,493! [i.e., more than ZAR250,000 per person per year] Despite the huge outlay, the US achieves worse health outcomes than other wealthy countries. For example, life …
