The week healthcare needed to flip its humanity to tech ratio, and I was in Denver

By Dave Wieneke | in | 7 Dec 2019 | 12 Comments

I flew out between Boston’s two snowstorms for travel to Denver, with only a brief delay which allowed time for playing corn-hole during a brief delay coming home. Here’s a photo of Jeff Cram making a tough shot as baggage handlers crossed the course.

This week’s rundown will be all headlines – with a promise of a deep dive on the American Hospital Associations lawsuit to block price transparency regulation as a separate post.

Gabriel Taye killed himself, he was 8:
affordable mental healthcare is getting harder to find for kids

In recent weeks I’ve posted about the trend of more children becoming suicidal at younger ages. This week, the suicide of 8-year-old Gabriel Taye gained national coverage, as his family sued the school system in which he was severely bullied. [Washington Post] Also this week, new research showed that access to mental health services hasn’t improved in the last 12 years, resulting in child mental heath being ten times more likely to required out of network services(which greater out of pocket costs) than other health needs. [Washington Post]

Peloton’s ill-fated holiday ad demonstrated the risk of giving a fitness gift to one’s spouse. Its stock dropped 9% during the week, as complaints of body shaming and just being creepy were raised in social media. Comedian Eva Victor’s parody of that Peloton holiday ad gained 3.5 million views as of this writing. [Eva Victor on Twitter]

 

Dexcom Blackout – continuous glucose monitoring manufacturer Dexcom has an app that shares updates about blood glucose levels with “followers” of patients. Such “followers” are often parents of kids with diabetes, so when this service stopped, around 6,000 of them flooded Dexcom’s Facebook page with urgent and angry messages. Dexcom says the outage was caused by too much traffic, and that it was an “unfortunate but isolated event”. Unlike Facebook, healthcare communities have healthcare reliability requirements – Dexcom paid a price this week for not living up the role their patients believed they would. [Medcity News]

Chinese surveillance agencies are backing genetic research to oppress ethnic minorities, raising ethical issues among scientists and technologists. Initiatives include training facial recognition to spot ethnic traits in photographs and using DNA to predict a persons appearance. [NY Times]

Self-care habits may be your best defense from dementia. 152 million people are expected to have dementia by 2050 — a deep dive on treatment research by WSJ says your habits may influence more than any treatment. [Wall St. Journal]

A growing number of Japanese have become recluses – over one million people have withdrawn to homes or bedrooms after buckling under pressure from school or work. Half of these hikikomori are over 40. Support groups and government programs are beginning to aid them and their family caretakers. [The Economist]

Help Remedies has stirred controversy by dramatically simplifing drug packaging by loosing the hard-to-pronounce names, and naming their products after the symptoms they treat. Suffering from allergies? The ‘Help, I have allergies’ packet, provides relief without the need to remember that you take Loratadine. [Creative Bloq]

Finally, yes there’s an ICD-10 code someone run-down by reindeer, so says Medical Economics which has a humorous list of holiday-related coding. [Medical Economics]