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Study Finds EMRs May Increase Health Costs
| Computerized patient records are unlikely to cut health care costs and may actually encourage doctors to order expensive tests more often. Industry experts have said that electronic health records could generate huge savings - as much as $80 billion a year. But research published Monday in the journal Health Affairs found that doctors using computers to track tests, like X-rays and MRIs , ordered far more tests than doctors relying on paper records.
While experts intend for EMRs to encourage sharing of tests, the study showed that doctors with computerized access to a patient's previous image results ordered tests on 18 percent of the visits, while those without the tracking technology ordered tests on 12.9 percent of visits. The gap was even greater -- 70 percent -- for more advanced and expensive image tests, including MRI and CT.
Health policy experts who have championed the adoption of electronic health records were critical of the study. They noted that the data came from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, which is intended mainly for another purpose - to assess how medical care is practiced. The study, they noted, included any kind of computer access to tracking images, no matter how old or isolated the function. By contrast, modern electronic health records are meant to give doctors an integrated view of a patient's care, including medical history, treatments, medications and past tests. The study data predates federal incentive payments for doctors and standards for the "meaningful use" of electronic health records that began last year. (NY Times) |
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Videogames Change Your Brain....for the better....
| Videogames can change a person's brain and, as researchers are finding, often that change is for the better. A growing body of university research suggests that gaming improves creativity, decision-making and perception. The specific benefits are wide ranging, from improved hand-eye coordination in surgeons to vision changes that boost night driving ability.
People who played action-based video and computer games made decisions 25% faster than others without sacrificing accuracy, according to a study. Indeed, the most adept gamers can make choices and act on them up to six times a second-four times faster than most people, other researchers found. Moreover, practiced game players can pay attention to more than six things at once without getting confused, compared with the four that someone can normally keep in mind. Scientists also found that women were better able to mentally manipulate 3D objects, a skill at which men are generally more adept.
"Videogames change your brain," said University of Wisconsin psychologist C. Shawn Green, who studies how electronic games affect abilities. So does learning to read or playing the piano, which have been shown to change the brain's physical structure. The powerful combination of concentration and rewarding surges of neurotransmitters like dopamine strengthen neural circuits in much the same the way that exercise builds muscles. But "games definitely hit the reward system in a way that not all activities do," he said.
A three-year study of 491 middle school students found that the more children played computer games the higher their scores on a standardized test of creativity-regardless of race, gender, or the kind of game played. The researchers ranked students on a widely used measure called the Torrance Test of Creativity, which involves such tasks as drawing an "interesting and exciting" picture from a curved shape on a sheet of paper, giving the picture a title, and then writing a story about it.
Electronic gameplay has its downside. Brain scans show that violent videogames can alter brain function in healthy young men after just a week of play, depressing activity among regions associated with emotional control, researchers at Indiana University recently reported. Other studies have found an association between compulsive gaming and being overweight, introverted and prone to depression. (WSJ) |
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Youngest in Class Often Misdiagnosed with ADHD
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The youngest children in a class are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than older children in the same class, a new study finds, and in some cases may not deserve the diagnosis. The researchers found that children born in December (the youngest in this study) were 39% more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD and 48% more likely to be receiving medication to treat it than children in the same class born in January (the oldest in the study). Researchers also found that the rate of ADHD diagnoses increased steadily with each successive month from January to December. The fact that there was such a difference in the rate of ADHD diagnoses simply based on children's birthdates, all other things being equal, strongly suggests that less mature students may have been inappropriately being labeled with an attention deficit disorder. The effect was found in both boys and girls - even more pronounced in girls, although boys have higher rates of ADHD in general. In this study, boys born in December were 30% more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than boys born in January,and 41% more likely to be prescribed a drug for the condition. Among the girls, those born in December were 70% more likely to be diagnosed and 77% more likely to be prescribed an ADHD treatment. Researchers say physicians should consider a child's age when evaluating him for ADHD and remember that not every deviation from so-called normal behavior is a sign of a medical condition. (TIME)
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