Specialty Focus 1/24/23: Minimizing treatment burden can help patients with chronic conditions + Iterative Health, Gastro Health partner

January 24, 2023 | Volume XII | Issue 4

How minimizing treatment burden can help patients with chronic conditions

John A. Dodson, MD writes in a KevinMD.com blog post:

An older patient recently told me that she spent 80 days over the past year in a doctor’s office. This represented over 20 percent of her life. She was relatively well but had several chronic medical conditions that required frequent office visits. In addition to these visits, she navigated scheduling, prescriptions, laboratory testing, and copayments.

Her experience is not unusual. For example, among patients with diabetes (a common chronic medical condition), a survey found that it would take nearly 4 hours per day to complete all guideline-recommended tasks.

Websites Selling Abortion Pills Are Sharing Sensitive Data with Google

Jennifer Gollan

Online pharmacies that sell abortion pills are sharing sensitive data with Google and other third parties, which may allow law enforcement to prosecute those who use the medications to end their pregnancies, a ProPublica analysis has found.

Using a tool created by the Markup, a nonprofit tech-journalism newsroom, ProPublica ran checks on 11 online pharmacies that sell abortion medication to reveal the web tracking technology they use. Late last year and in early January, ProPublica found web trackers on the sites of at least nine online pharmacies that provide pills by mail: Abortion Ease, BestAbortionPill.com, PrivacyPillRX, PillsOnlineRX, Secure Abortion Pills, AbortionRx, Generic Abortion Pills, Abortion Privacy and Online Abortion Pill Rx.

These third-party trackers, including a Google Analytics tool and advertising technologies, collect a host of details about users and feed them to tech behemoth Google, its parent company, Alphabet, and other third parties, such as the online chat provider LiveChat. Those details include the web addresses the users visited, what they clicked on, the search terms they used to find a website, the previous site they visited, their general location and information about the devices they used, such as whether they were on a computer or phone.

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Mass. doctor talks about new strain of gonorrhea

WCVB Channel 5 Boston

State health officials say a "concerning" strain of gonorrhea with a reduced response to antibiotics has been detected in Massachusetts. Dr. Simone Wildes, an infectious disease specialist at South Shore Health, discusses a new strain of gonorrhea.

Watch the video HERE.

Last Word

Publisher of Week in Review, Specialty Focus, FHIweekly & Game Changers