Digital Health Frontier
By John Halamka and Paul Cerrato — New digital tools are a two-edged sword that come with a unique set of benefits and risks. We need a regulatory framework to manage them responsibly.
By John Halamka and Paul Cerrato — With over 10,000 mental health apps available, it’s difficult to know which ones will actually have a therapeutic impact. Fortunately, enough high-quality evidence is available to help clinicians and patients make an informed choice.
By John Halamka and Paul Cerrato — The bionic man and woman are no longer fictional TV characters. With the help of state-of-the-art digital technology, they’re your next-door neighbor.
By John Halamka and Paul Cerrato — The National Institute of Standards and Technology recently published a framework that will help health care providers assess AI trustworthiness, explainability, and bias.
By John Halamka and Paul Cerrato — ChatGPT and similar systems will increasingly be part of our lives, including health care. We need guidelines to ensure their ethical deployment.
By John Halamka and Paul Cerrato — When clinicians have no definitive guidelines or empirical evidence on which to base their decisions, they still must come up with a care plan that meets their patients’ needs. Combining data from the available published studies with intelligence gleaned from electronic patient records can often address the dilemma.
By John Halamka and Paul Cerrato - The broad access to such services that occurred at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic should not be rolled back. Finding a way to extend the regulatory waivers that made this possible is in our patients’ best interest.
By John Halamka and Paul Cerrato - There’s no shortage of startups with creative ways to use the technology to improve patient care and make clinicians’ lives less burdensome, and that includes digital assistants.
By John Halamka and Paul Cerrato - EHR optimization remains an elusive goal for many health care providers, but several digital assistants may help solve the problem.
By John Halamka and Paul Cerrato - Enabled by natural language processing, these digital tools are slowly finding their way into clinical practice. Despite the potential to make it easier to navigate an EHR system, they come with problems of their own.
By John Halamka and Paul Cerrato - We can empower patients by providing high quality educational materials, encouraging medical self-care, and by finding ways to incorporate patient-generated health data into clinical practice.
By John Halamka and Paul Cerrato -Three patient populations are underrepresented in the AI models currently being developed. There are several practical solutions to the problem.