Ohara Kecil

  Harvard Medical School will no longer submit data to U.S. News & World Report for the magazine’s annual “best medical schools” rankings, becoming the university’s second graduate school to boycott the list in recent months, the school’s dean said on Tuesday. In a letter, Dr. George Daley, dean of the faculty of medicine, said he had been debating the decision since becoming dean six years ago and was inspired by a group of top of law schools that withdrew from the rankings last fall. My concerns and the perspectives I have heard from others are more philosophical than methodological, and rest on the principled belief that rankings cannot meaningfully reflect the high aspirations for educational excellence, graduate preparedness, and compassionate and equitable patient care that we strive to foster in our medical education programs, Dr. Daley said. U.S. News has published the rankings for decades, and while they have come under growing criticism, they continue to be an influen...

 When people log in to Koko, an online emotional support chat service based in San Francisco, they expect to swap messages with an anonymous volunteer. They can ask for relationship advice, discuss their depression or find support for nearly anything else — a kind of free, digital shoulder to lean on. But for a few thousand people, the mental health support they received wasn’t entirely human. Instead, it was augmented by robots. In October, Koko ran an experiment in which GPT-3, a newly popular artificial intelligence chatbot, wrote responses either in whole or in part. Humans could edit the responses and were still pushing the buttons to send them, but they weren’t always the authors.  About 4,000 people got responses from Koko at least partly written by AI, Koko co-founder Robert Morris said. The experiment on the small and little-known platform has blown up into an intense controversy since he disclosed it a week ago, in what may be a preview of more ethical disputes to co...

A New York Supreme Court judge struck down a mandate Friday that required all health care workers in the state to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, saying Gov. Kathy Hochul and the New York State Department of Health had exceeded its authority. In his ruling, Judge Gerard Neri said the mandate is "null, void, and of no effect" because the state can’t require health care workers to get vaccinations that aren’t required by public health law, which includes mumps, measles and hepatitis. The state health department said Saturday it is "exploring its options" after the ruling. The lawsuit was brought by Medical Professionals for Informed Consent, which included health care employees who stood to or had already lost their jobs over the requirement."The State Health Department strongly disagrees with the judge’s decision and is exploring its options," the agency said in a statement to the Associated Press, adding that the COVID-19 mandate protected the most ...

A short stroll every half hour may help undo the health harms associated with prolonged periods of sitting, a new study finds. Mounting evidence has suggested that sitting for long periods of time — an inescapable fact of life for many workers — is hazardous to health even for those who exercise regularly. In the new study, volunteers who got up and walked for five minutes every half hour had lower blood sugar and blood pressure than those who sat continuously. The researchers also found that walking for one minute every hour helped with blood pressure, but not blood sugar, according to the small study published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. “If you have a job that requires you to sit most of the day or have a largely sedentary lifestyle, this is one strategy that could improve your health and offset the health harms from sitting,” said the study’s lead author, Keith Diaz, an associate professor of behavioral medicine at the Columbia University Vagelos College of ...

  Dr. Paul Jeffords and his colleagues at Atlanta-based Resurgens Orthopaedics were worried about their ability to survive financially, even though their independent orthopedic practice was the largest in Georgia, with nearly 100 physicians.They nervously watched other physician practices sell out entirely to large hospital systems and health insurers. They refused to consider doing that. “It was an arms race,” Jeffords said, “and we knew we had to do something different if we wanted to remain independent and strong and offer good quality of care.” So, in December 2021, Resurgens sold a 60% share in United Musculoskeletal Partners, their own management company, to Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, a large New York-based private equity firm known as Welsh Carson. Although details of the sale were not disclosed, physician-shareholders in deals like this typically each receive a multimillion-dollar cash payout, plus the potential for subsequent big payouts each time the practice is...

 What Occurred Jeff King, of Lawrence, Kan., wanted his coronary heart rhythm restored to regular with a process known as an ablation — sooner reasonably than later, his physician stated. Jeff requested the hospital for a value estimate, however stated he did not hear again earlier than his scheduled surgical procedure in January 2021 at Stormont Vail Well being in Topeka, Kan. The actual ache got here when the invoice arrived within the mail just a few weeks later. The Kings, who had been uninsured on the time, had been on the hook for practically the entire price.Jeff and Kareen King obtained the invoice for $160,000 just a few weeks after Jeff had the process to revive his coronary heart rhythm. The Kings had been initially on the hook for nearly all of it. As a substitute of signing up for conventional medical insurance, the Kings had joined what's known as a "medical cost-sharing plan" with an organization known as Sedera, which describes its service as a "refre...