Author: Praveen Suthrum

About one in four primary care clinicians surveyed preferred a stool-based test to a colonoscopy for colorectal cancer screening, according to findings published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings. “Clinician recommendation is the most consistently identified factor associated with colorectal cancer screening,” Lila J. Finney Rutten, PhD, a health services researcher at Mayo Clinic, told Healio Primary Care. “We know from previously published research that patients are more likely to comply with recommendations that align with their preferences. Thus, it is critical for clinicians to inform patients of their options for colorectal cancer screening and to engage patients in shared decision-making about…

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Looming labor shortages in the medical industry have been widely reported, and gastroenterologists are expected to follow the trend. Michael Weinstein, MD, president and CEO at Silver Spring, Md.-based Capital Digestive Care, told “Becker’s ASC Review Podcast” that newly-minted gastroenterologists are reaping the rewards of being in high demand — though that demand could drop off if the market shifts some of their responsibilities to other clinicians.

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As it did last year, the coronavirus pandemic dominated health care news in 2021, challenging a return to normalcy. The death toll in the U.S. alone crossed 800,000, but the availability of effective vaccines offers hope. In this post, we look back on the year’s most salient health care developments, focusing first on COVID-19 and then on other events. All Americans 5 and older became eligible for COVID-19 vaccines. Scientific breakthroughs in 2020 led to the development of three coronavirus vaccines. President Biden directed states to make every adult eligible for a vaccine by April 19, 2021; by the summer,…

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The pandemic has created financial challenges for hospitals, long-term care providers and specialty services providers. Operating costs for staffing in hospitals hardest hit by the pandemic have eroded margins. Medicare and private insurers have cut reimbursement. Federal policies that discourage hospital consolidation and encourage greater price transparency have bipartisan support. Affordability and uneven access are growing concerns to voters. The transition from fee-for-service to value-based care via alternative payment programs has been disappointing prompting policymakers to re-think their strategies. Collectively, these conditions handicap traditional providers of care: those affiliated with multi-unit systems have fared better in sectors where demand is…

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We are all for new technologies here, spending our days researching where the science of medicine goes. With that said, every now and then we see something so creepy that it freaks out even the seasoned team of The Medical Futurist. So here we collected ten examples of either super creepy medical technologies or ingeniously evil uses of perfectly innocent technologies. 

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