Dear clients and friends: Given your interest in health and medicine, we would like to share with you our collection of the most interesting perspectives on our industry's trends and developments. We are happy to share them with you — and hope you share your thoughts with us.

Here’s to yuletide cheer and fewer discussions about the weather!

1. Telehealth for All Some!

The alluring promise of telehealth has been that it expands access. But what if the opposite is true? What if telehealth reinforces structural barriers and prevents access? A new academic study on telehealth services for mental health suggests that may be the case:

While video visits are convenient for many, this modality appears to pose logistical barriers for lower income, publicly insured, and rural children and adolescents. Improving their access to telemental health services would likely help achieve more equitable access to outpatient mental health care.

2. Not Yet

Dr. Bertalan Mesko pours a dose of reality on “the most overhyped technologies in healthcare.” The “medical futurist” marvels at the potential but keeps an eye on the practical. His list includes 3D printed drugs, telemedicine kiosks, organs-on-chips, and more. Here’s his take on healthcare dashboards:

 Health data dashboards claim to analyse comprehensive personal health data to provide tailored lifestyle and health advice. However, the reality falls short of the promise. While the idea of a centralized platform capable of delivering personalised health recommendations is captivating, current technology is not yet sophisticated enough to accurately interpret the complex web of factors that influence individual health. The challenge lies not only in gathering vast amounts of data but also in understanding the intricate interplay between genetics, environment, lifestyle, and health.

3. AI’s Uphill War on Cancer

Radiologists can relax, for now. MIT Technology Review reports on a Mayo study exposing the problems AI needs to solve to detect cancer. First, there’s not enough data. Second, there probably won’t be for a while: 

Tissue samples from biopsies are tiny—often just a couple of millimeters in diameter—but are magnified to such a degree that digital images of them contain more than 14 billion pixels. That makes them about 287,000 times larger than images used to train the best AI image recognition models to date.

4. From Adversity, Opportunity

Ntobeko Ntusi, President and CEO of the South African Medical Research Council, argues that US cuts to foreign health aid may be a dark cloud with a silver lining: “As bad as the crisis is, it presents an opportunity to reconceptualize global health.” In Nature, Ntusi lays out a plan for long-time aid recipients:

Countries in the global south must identify their own priorities and define, fund and implement them — and not be reactionary to the politics of the global north. If African nations, for example, had stepped up and taken ownership of HIV treatment in the region, a rollback of PEPFAR would have limited impact. If Africa had a regional vaccine-manufacturing system, the continent would not have been left behind during the COVID-19 or mpox crises.

5. What Now for Health Equity?

In both industry and advocacy, the past few years have seen a surge in interest in health equity. Will the tide recede? The Economist reads the currents of “America’s diversity wars” and reaches an emphatic conclusion about the future: TBD. Pharma leaders must now navigate the uncertain waters:

Deals with the state will now require companies to take a vow of abstinence from “programmes promoting DEI that violate any applicable federal anti-discrimination laws”. But DEI is a broad bag of concepts. So far that ambiguity has aided its supporters: one man’s discriminatory pursuit of diversity is another’s agenda for inclusion.