Massachusetts Medical Society

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Doctors Promoting Treatments on Social Media Routinely Fail to Disclose Ties to Drug Makers

Sheila Kaplan | STAT | February 29, 2016

Physicians across the United States routinely offer medical advice on social media — but often fail to mention that they have accepted tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars from the companies that make the prescription drugs they tout. A STAT examination of hundreds of social media accounts shows that health care professionals virtually never note their conflicts of interest, some of them significant, when promoting drugs or medical devices on sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The practice cuts across all specialties...

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Is the Technology Gap the Reason Why Medical Errors are the 3rd Leading Cause of Death in the US?

Hardly a day goes by without some new revelation of an information technology (IT) mess in the United States that seems like an endless round of the old radio show joke contest, “Can You Top This” except that increasingly the joke is on us. From nuclear weapons updated with floppy disks, to critical financial systems in the Department of the Treasury that run on assembler language code (a computer language initially used in the 1950s and typically tied to the hardware for which it was developed), to medical systems that cannot exchange patient records leading to a large number of needless deaths from medical errors.

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