Wylie Burke, MD, PhD is the 2016 Max and Sara Cowan Memorial Lecturer Dr. Burke is Professor in the Department of Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Washington (UW)...
Telemedicine can improve access to care and lower costs, but how do we make sure it’s safe and of value to the patient and not just health systems figuring out...
Empowering consumers to shop based on price and quality was supposed to force health organizations to compete on those terms—making health care better and more affordable. Yet, health spending continues...
It's a pervasive dilemma in health care. Though the industry is in flux, and we know "business-as-usual" can't last, there’s no real urgency to change because the old way of...
Otherwise healthy older people with low levels of bicarbonate, a major element in the body that helps maintain proper pH balance, were at a 24 percent higher risk of dying...
Rachel (not her real name) has been a patient of mine for more than three years. She has a borderline personality disorder that makes it extremely difficult for her to...
By implementing a program to prevent bloodstream infections associated with central-line catheters, the University of Utah Health Care Burn Trauma Intensive Care Unit eliminated those hazards entirely, a multidisciplinary committee...
Constrained funding, constantly being asked to do more with less, increased scrutiny and an unclear roadmap for the future—health care’s constant flux is making medicine harder than it should be...
Patients aren’t alone in their angst over soaring drug costs. Hospitals, too, are struggling to keep up with price hikes on older, off-patent drugs—and some are having to make tough...
Think academic medicine is stodgy, hidebound or slow to innovate? Think again. Faculty, scientists and administrators of the nation’s teaching hospitals are actually quite progressive and optimistic about the future...
Don't expect precision medicine to bring relief from soaring health care costs. Genetically targeting therapies to those patients most likely to benefit spares them the time and toxicity of trying...
Michael Boehnke, Ph.D. has spent two decades searching for the genetic roots of type 2 diabetes, which affects more than 300 million individuals worldwide and accounts for 10 percent of...
Diagnostics are “the gateway” to precision medicine. They are “absolutely critical,” and it’s critical that the science behind them be “precise, accurate and actionable,” emphasized Dean Li, M.D., Ph.D., at...
He’s been called a “medical mystery man,” a “super diagnostician,” and “one of the last, best hopes for people suffering from rare, debilitating and undiagnosed medical conditions.” But don’t compare...
In the small-town Kansas of Richard Weinshilboum, M.D.’s childhood, most of the local doctor’s patients received the same treatment when they were sick: a placebo and a comforting dose of...
Cancer is the leading cause of disease-related death in children, and “10 to 30 percent of such cases are related to a genetic risk”—a cruel fate that can make families...
Doctors don't have a lot of "down time," especially residents. But Erin Helms, M.D., a new mom and third year Chief Resident of the University of Utah's Family Medicine Residency...
Alterations to brain circuits underpinning intellectual disability, autism and other neuropsychiatric disorders appear to be related to subtle cellular changes that occur when a gene is disrupted in the hippocampus–a...
