Morning Headlines 1/2/20

Doctors, Nurses and the Paperwork Crisis That Could Unite Them

Professors of nursing and medicine urge the professions to come together to reduce the documentation requirements enforced by the “bureaucratic nightmare” of EHRs.  

Using AI to improve breast cancer screening

A study in UK hospitals with the participation of Google Health finds that an AI model that supports radiologists in detecting breast cancer produced a modest reduction in false negatives and positives even though the model did not have access to patient histories and prior mammograms.  

The Family Wanted a Do Not Resuscitate Order. The Doctors Didn’t.

A ProPublica report finds that transplant doctors sometimes talk families out of asking for DNR or withdrawing life support within 30 days to avoid skewing the survival statistics of their programs. 

Social media hosted a lot of fake health news this year. Here’s what went most viral.

The most widely shared health misinformation on social media in 2019, much of it originating with anti-vaccination groups, include the US government conspiring with drug companies to hide cancer cures, herbs and homeopathy that cure cancer and chronic conditions more effectively than medical treatments, and the injuries and deaths caused by vaccines.

Woman wrongly told she had cancer when software misheard doctor

A hospital in England apologizes to an endoscopy patient for telling her doctor that her exam revealed “cancer,” which it says was an unnoticed mistake made by its speech recognition software that misunderstood the word “candida” that relates to the patient’s yeast infection.