closer look
It's not just JPM: Pumping breastmilk in bathrooms is common at health care conferences
Adobe
Nearly 100 people reached out to STAT's Tara Bannow to comment on her column about the difficulty of pumping at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco last week. Breastfeeding moms told similar stories of pumping in bathroom stalls while attending conferences important for their jobs. Then there's this: The founder of one biotech company said she did so right before presenting on stage.
Many women endure such situations in silence for fear of jeopardizing their careers, they told Tara. Most of them declined to speak on record. "There's this thing about being a female," said Aoife Brennan, CEO of the biotech firm Synlogic and a three-time mom who has pumped in many a bathroom stall. "You just want to show that you're on par with the guys and so asking for any sort of accommodation just feels like a weakness." Read more, including some history.
health
Women pay a price in poorer health, report says
Women spend 25% more of their lives — an average of nine years — in poor health than men, according to a new report from the World Economic Forum. Around 5% of women's health gap concerns reproductive health, the report estimates, but only 2% of the global investment in medical research is directed toward improving it, STAT's Annalisa Merelli tells us.
The report also notes that there are systemic problems even in areas where research is being conducted. Trials focus disproportionately on men, leading to 65% of interventions — such as asthma inhalers — being less effective for women than men. Plus, women have a harder time accessing treatment. Diagnosing women with conditions like cancer or diabetes can take, on average, years longer than men, and specifically female issues such as endometriosis can take a decade to be identified.
These issues have a cost, and not for women alone: The WEF estimates that closing the gender gap, thus allowing women to more fully engage in the workforce, could increase the global GDP by $1 trillion by 2040.
health tech
Coming soon to an electronic health record near you: AI for clinical notes
Microsoft will launch its artificial intelligence tool for automating clinical documentation within health records software made by Epic, the company said yesterday, a move to embed the technology in health systems nationwide. That would be a shortcut to the note writing that now takes up what clinicians say is too much of their time. Here's how it would work: Dax Copilot will automatically draft notes through the Epic mobile app Haiku, which clinicians can immediately review. Hospitals and clinics already use this AI tool, but including it in software made by Epic, the largest seller in this space, will vastly broaden its reach.
Yesterday's announcement arrives as federal regulators are only beginning to consider ways to evaluate products that rely on generative AI, STAT's Casey Ross and Brittany Trang note. Generative AI systems are designed to produce open-ended answers — the accuracy of which, and value in performing a task, is left to the judgment of the user. Read more about how this may play out.
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