Health care

Hospitals are turning to technology to address one of the most intractable risks their patients face: medical errors.More than two decades after the launch of a national patient-safety movement to tackle the alarming toll of medical mistakes, preventing those errors has proved much harder than expected. Despite research that shows some improvement over time, hospitalized patients are still at substantial risk of medication mishaps, hospital infections, breakdowns in nursing care, and complications from surgery and other…

An Indiana doctor has top marks on several physician-review sites, with one patient writing that the doctor was the best she had seen in years. The site, however, is missing some key information—including his conviction for insurance fraud, medical-malpractice claims and a licensing-board sanction. Doctor-rating websites regularly fail to mention such black marks on physicians’ records, according to research published in November in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies.  The researchers compared two groups of online…

Donate Life America, the nonprofit that works to maintain the National Donate Life Registry, has decided to create a set of polyhedral dice that symbolize the eight organs and tissues that can be donated in order to save another person’s life. The dice were produced by Crux Scenica in Richmond, Virginia, who crafted these pieces by hand. Only fifty sets will be given away. While typically a set of polyhedral dice have seven die, this set includes eight die. Each die has cast inside of it a hand-painted resin replica of…

Developed for several decades, virtual reality or VR technology attracted significant attention in 2012 with the launch of HMD (head-mounted play) products, such as Oculus Rift and Google Cardboard. Before then, virtual reality was mostly used in video games and entertainment. The new developments, however, quickly increased the number of possible VR uses. Combined, AR (augmented reality) and VR technologies were valued at $15.3 billion in 2020, with a projected growth of $77 billion by 2027. Out of all industries…

Image: Shutterstock (Shutterstock)Far too many Americans are making sacrifices due to the outrageous costs of health care in the United States, a new survey this week suggests. The findings estimate that nearly 100 million Americans have recently had to work around the prospect of pricier medical bills in some way, either by cutting back on other essentials like food, borrowing money, or outright avoiding their medical care.Polling organization Gallup conducted the survey in June 2022, in conjunction with the nonprofit…

Image: Shutterstock (Shutterstock)A drugmaker is now officially making the case for an over-the-counter birth control pill to be sold in the U.S. On Monday, the company HRA Pharma said it has submitted an application to the Food and Drug Administration to approve an OTC version of its existing contraceptive product. The move comes amid an ongoing effort by the Republican party to restrict women’s reproductive rights at the state level.More than 60% of women between the ages of 15 and49 are estimated to use some form of…

In a tumultuous few weeks, the Supreme Court has ignored the scientific evidence underlying safe abortion, the need to slow climate change, and the value of gun safety laws. It is alarming that the justices have now indicated a willingness to consider a voting rights case next term, given Chief Justice John Roberts’ feelings on what he calls the “sociological gobbledygook” of research into the effects of gerrymandering. The promise of democracy is being sorely tested by the recent injustices leveled by the Supreme…

Photo: Nick Laham / Allsport (Getty Images)Ryan Petersen, the CEO of a logistics tech company called Flexport, tweeted out a photo that went viral Monday, purporting to show a time when McDonald’s used supposedly healthier cooking methods. Petersen suggested the people from this allegedly ancient photo were much healthier than the people of 2022, insinuating it’s because they weren’t consuming seed oils, a currentboogeyman in the diet world. But just about everything in Petersen’s tweet is wrong or misleading.“This…