Behind the curtain with Dr. Glaucomflecken

Will Flanary at home in Portland, Ore. (AYŞE GÜRSÖZ FOR STAT)

If you haven’t seen Dr. Glaucomflecken's 90-second miniature portraits of our health care system in all its inanity, we’ll wait while you hop on Twitter or YouTube or TikTok. Then come back to STAT to read Damian Garde’s profile of Will Flanary, an Oregon ophthalmologist whose decidedly unfunny near-death experience launched performance art that illuminates the maddening reality of medicine for patients and doctors. He peoples Dr. Glaucomflecken's General Hospital with the lackadaisical emergency medicine doctor (eternally clad in cycling gear), the warm but disconcertingly studious pediatrician, the charmingly alarmist dermatologist, the meatheaded orthopedic surgeon, and Jonathan, the loyal medical scribe whose dedication borders on sociopathy. “I can be pretty specific with different areas of medicine and create this world of, honestly, pretty dysfunctional people,” he told Damian. “But it’s funny.” Spoiler alert: he’s right.

Google looks to gets its health efforts back on track with search tools

At Google, it doesn’t get much more fundamental than search. What better way to show its struggling health efforts are back on track? Yesterday, Google announced a new search engine feature that will show available appointments for participating medical practices, not unlike how users can check movie times and dinner reservations directly from a business profile in search. The new feature plays to Google’s strengths, as the company works to bolster its health efforts following the dismantling of the Google Health organization. When it launches in coming weeks, the feature will show appointments for CVS MinuteClinics, and Google is partnering with third-party scheduling tools Kyruus and Stericycle Communications Solutions. Experts caution that even something as seemingly simple as an appointment booking service can be challenging in a complex health care system. STAT’s Mario Aguilar has more.

A hospital lobbying giant pivots to venture capital

The American Hospital Association is a lobbying powerhouse, championing the interests of its thousands of member hospitals before Congress. Now the trade group is dipping its toes into a decidedly different arena: venture capital investing. It’s rare for trade groups to dabble in venture capital — where investors fund startups in exchange for stakes in those emerging companies. But the not-for-profit AHA says it’s well-positioned to get health care startups off the ground because it can offer up their technologies to its almost 5,000 members. While the AHA clearly expects to get its money back and then some, the funds involved are small relative to the size of the health care industry. That gives the impression that serving members is the real driver behind this, James Nicholls of the health care investment company Fitzroy Health told STAT’s Tara Bannow. Read more in STAT+.

Closer look: AI leader has a humbler vision to transform health care

From a high perch within Google, Greg Corrado is steering the development of artificial intelligence tools he believes will dramatically improve health care in coming years. “It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that we could cut [global] mortality in half over the coming decades,” Corrado, the director of health AI within Google’s research division, told STAT’s Casey Ross about one of its key efforts, which would harness AI to scan ultrasound images for potentially deadly pregnancy complications. But in a rare interview, Corrado, an unabashed evangelist of AI’s transformative power, struck a cautionary note seldom heard in Silicon Valley. “In the health space, I don’t think technology companies should do anything like ‘move fast and break things,’” he said, referencing a common mantra of tech culture. “We actually really, really need to be careful.” Read more in STAT+.

Diabetic amputations were higher in states that didn't expand Medicaid

Foot ulcers that lead to amputation are a well-known risk for people with diabetes, a risk that is disproportionately higher among African American, Hispanic, and American Indian people. One reason for the disparity is believed to be less access to medical care. A new study in JAMA Network Open tested this hypothesis by comparing leg amputation rates among people in states that did or did not expand Medicaid eligibility during the first two years of the Affordable Care Act. The researchers found that among more than 115,000 hospitalizations for diabetic foot ulcers among people in racial or ethnic minority groups, amputations were 9% higher in states that did not expand Medicaid coverage. There was no change in states that did expand Medicaid. This new project in The State reports on high amputation rates in just one South Carolina ZIP code.

Harassment of scientists surges with pandemic

Last week we told you about U.S. public health officials under fire during the pandemic. A new survey in Science takes the pulse of researchers around the world who’ve published papers on Covid-19, some of whom have become targets of harassment. Of the 510 who responded, more than a third said they’d received some sort of attack, from insults to death threats. Two harrowing examples:

Before Covid, “I never experienced anybody calling me a filthy immigrant, telling me I deserve to be raped and have my head on a spike because I want to vaccinate kids,” said Fatima Tokhmafshan, a geneticist at McGill University and a refugee from Iran at age 17.
It’s a “quiet week” if epidemiologist Saskia Popescu of the University of Arizona doesn’t receive at least two or three sexualized messages, ranging from creepy men demanding attention to rape threats.

What to read around the web today

The disillusionment of a Rikers Island doctor. The New Yorker
Evidence grows that vaccines lower the risk of getting long Covid. NPR
Despite competition, U.S. cancer drug prices rose even as they fell in Germany and Switzerland. STAT+
Life’s preference for symmetry is like ‘a new law of nature.’ New York Times
Opinion: How we got herd immunity wrong. STAT