Most patients and health care providers would agree that interdisciplinary care leads to the most successful patient outcomes. In gastroenterology, two key members of a care team — GI dietitians and GI psychologists — work together to improve their patients’ nutritional status, manage gastrointestinal symptoms and enhance food-related and overall quality of life.
Author: Praveen Suthrum
Gastroenterology is a field ripe for medical device innovation, and medtech developers know that some of the best ideas come from practicing doctors. With that in mind, Medical Design & Outsourcing spoke with two gastroenterologists about what device innovations would help them better diagnose and treat gastrointestinal diseases. Dr. Aasma Shaukat is the director of outcomes research at NYU Langone Health’s Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology. She’s also the NYU Grossman School of Medicine’s Robert M. and Mary H. Glickman professor of medicine and a professor of population health.
London-based personalised nutrition startup Zoe has received a $2.5 million investment from recent VC world entry Flight Fund. According to the company, the additional capital will be used to further scale operations. Putting the commercial play aside for a moment, Zoe is fusing tech with collaborations with leading scientists around the world, resulting in the ongoing PREDICT programme, a global nutritional research initiative, and an 800,000-person observational study to measure the accuracy of its AI diagnostic for COVID-19. Based on results uncovered in the PREDICT programme, Zoe’s personalised nutrition offer begins with at-home tests that analyse blood sugar, blood fat…
Although virtual visits have decreased and in-person visits have risen since the initial COVID-19 wave in 2020, telemedicine remains an important option in gastroenterology and requires clear guidance for best practices moving forward, according to a new clinical practice update from the American Gastroenterological Association. The postpandemic era must balance patient and provider preferences, medical needs, quality of care, regulatory requirements, and reimbursement rules, Ziad Gellad, MD, associate professor of medicine in the gastroenterology division at Duke University, Durham, N.C., and colleagues wrote.
Virtual monopolies exist in almost every healthcare sector: from hospitals and health systems to drug companies and beyond. With so much consolidation of power and influence, U.S. healthcare has become a conglomerate of monopolies. That’s the topic of this continuing series. Doctors are drowning in a sea of paperwork and patient visits—the result of increasing demands foisted on them by insurers and hospital administrators. With less time spent taking care of people and more spent tending to administrative tasks, physicians are experiencing greater stress (financial and psychological), along with “a dramatic increase in burnout and decrease in satisfaction,” according to…
CHARLOTTE, N.C.—Many major insurance companies do not adhere to the most recent recommendations on inflammatory bowel disease treatment from the American College of Gastroenterology and the American Gastroenterological Association, according to an analysis of insurance company policies. The study, conducted by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston, analyzed publicly available insurance policy data from the top 50 U.S. insurance companies, which represent 80% of the market. The investigators compared policy data for adalimumab (Humira, AbbVie), infliximab (Remicade, Janssen), tofacitinib (Xeljanz, Pfizer), ustekinumab (Stelara, Janssen), and vedolizumab (Entyvio, Takeda) with the latest ACG and AGA guidelines on ulcerative…
Doctors have long diagnosed many of our sickest patients with “demoralization syndrome,” a condition commonly associated with terminal illness that’s characterized by a sense of helplessness and loss of purpose. American physicians are now increasingly suffering from a similar condition, except our demoralization is not a reaction to a medical condition, but rather to the diseased systems for which we work. The United States is the only large high-income nation that doesn’t provide universal health care to its citizens. Instead, it maintains a lucrative system of for-profit medicine. For decades, at least tens of thousands of preventable deaths have occurred…
While insurers impose prior authorization requirements to manage cost and quality control, most physicians say the rules cause unnecessary waste and can lead to avoidable harm for patients, according to a survey out Monday from the American Medical Association. Over a third of physicians said the requirements led to a serious adverse event for one of their patients, such as hospitalization, permanent impairment or death, the survey found. About 60% said the requirements led to resources being diverted to ineffective initial treatments or additional office visits, and almost half said they lead patients to seek urgent or emergency care.
LONDON — James East, M.D., spends his days skillfully examining people’s colons, searching for and snaring away suspicious polyps that might one day turn into cancer. A gastroenterologist at Mayo Clinic Healthcare in London, he says the ability to identify cancer risks and eliminate them on the spot during a colonoscopy is one of the most satisfying parts of his chosen profession. Colonoscopy remains the gold standard in detecting and preventing colorectal cancer. But the procedure has limitations. Some studies suggest that more than half of post-colonoscopy colon cancer cases arise from lesions that were missed at patients’ previous colonoscopies. Now…
Dayton, Ohio, is the best paying city for gastroenterologists of any experience level regardless of practice setting, paying an average salary of $510,925, according to the Medscape Salary Explorer. Here are the top five best paying cities for gastroenterologists of any experience level in any practice setting and their respective average salaries, according to the Medscape Salary Explorer: