I have had the privilege of practicing primary care for over 20 years at a community health center in Chelsea, Mass. This vibrant city is the dignified home to a diverse and proud community. It is also home to a lower-income population, living in a historically red-lined zone with sweltering urban heat islands that routinely experience temperatures 6°F higher than the National Weather Service’s regional report. With overcrowded residential buildings sandwiched among numerous ...

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI), especially since ChatGPT first gained wide recognition in 2022, have led to a wide array of potential applications and solutions for challenges in delivering improved primary care. There are several reasons to be optimistic that these technologies will be a positive transformative force, and some particular areas in which health care systems may also need to exercise some degree of caution. The following are some areas in which we might expect to see clinical improvements as an impact of AI integration, and some ...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in health care refers to the use of advanced computational algorithms and technologies to analyze complex medical data and assist in clinical decision-making, diagnostics, treatment planning, and patient management. Using machine learning, natural language processing, and neural networks, AI can process large datasets, identify patterns, and make predictions based on data that are often beyond the capacity of human cognition, thereby

On April 16, 2024, I took night call for the last time, 64 years after I first took night call. For the last few months, I have been thinking about all of the changes I have seen relating to the nature and content of my time being on call. After my first year at Harvard College in 1959, my mother—the chief technologist in a hospital hematology lab—thought it would be useful for me to get training as a hematology technician during the summer so I could get a job when I returned to school in the fall. She arranged summer work for me in a hematology lab, and when I returned ...

It all started innocuously enough in the week leading up to Christmas in 2019 with a runny nose, a cough, and some fussiness. All pretty standard for our one-year-old daughter, who spends time with other kids at daycare sharing germs more readily than toys. Over the next few days, however, the cough got worse and the fussiness increased. We were still thinking it was just a cold until the lethargy hit. She wasn’t eating or drinking well, she had spiked a fever that wouldn’t level out, and seeing our normally active child—a girl who wasn’t even still when she slept—lying down listlessly ...

The Steward Health Care system collapse has raised alarm bells and activated a crisis response from many levels of Massachusetts’ political and health care leadership. Through a still-evolving series of action steps, this crisis will eventually resolve. When the fire has been put out, however, an important lesson will remain: this crisis has its origins in the dangerous set of health care policies and decisions that got us to this point. As health care leaders ...

In the 17th annual Child Fatality Review Report, the DC Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA) disclosed the death of a 9-year-old female involved in the foster care system from an asthma-related complication in 2021. While asthma is a serious pediatric condition, affecting roughly 6.5% of children aged 0-17, it is one that can be ...

The obesity prevalence among U.S. adults has increased at an alarming rate in the past several decades, reaching 42 percent in 2018 or about 110 million people based on census data. By 2035, the prevalence of obesity in the U.S. is expected to reach 58 percent, with the total ...