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.

1. The NHS’s “Vicious Cycle”

Longer lines. Slower service. Grumpy staff. Rising costs.

It’s not only airports, hotels, and your favorite burrito place. The post-COVID hangover has hit health systems – hard. Perhaps none more so than the UK’s faltering NHS. Writing in The Guardian, one healthcare worker walks through a tough day-in-the-life:

 
At one point it feels as if I’m running between bays, and it seems that whenever I enter a room to answer one call bell, another patient collars me and asks for something else. In all the excitement, we have failed to tag the bay with the fall-prone patients, and I arrive just in time to prevent an elderly man from clambering out of bed. Just as I’m leaving the bay, a stony-faced relative approaches me and demands an update on her father’s most recent MRI scan.

The author’s conclusion offers no remedy: “if [clinicians] are forced to work in places where there aren’t enough staff to properly care for the patients, a vicious cycle takes hold. It becomes harder to offer good care, and the work becomes even tougher and less satisfying.”

2. China’s Fever Dream

Triage alert: the UK’s healthcare woes take a back seat to China’s. The repeal of zero-COVID has thrust the world’s most populous country into crisis. 1843 magazine shares three first-hand accounts from Chinese doctors who are under unrelenting pressure to provide care – even when they’re COVID positive:

Yang, a kidney doctor in Sichuan, paused at the door of the dialysis room. When he was diagnosed with covid in mid-December, the department’s head doctor told him categorically that he was to come back to work the following day. He thought about the patients inside, all suffering from kidney failure. The prospect of infecting them with covid was alarming. It might even kill them.

3. Policy Chill

 If pharma execs and policy wonks set a new year’s resolution to get along better, they’re off to a poor start. The fisticuffs cross the Atlantic:

 In Europe: Bayer has said it is shifting the focus of its pharmaceutical business to the US and away from Europe and the UK, where governments are making “big mistakes” in how they manage health budgets.

In the UK: Pharmaceutical companies said that the [UK’s] “punishing” [payback] charges are forcing them to reduce their footprint, research and development, and manufacturing investments. Meanwhile, the number of clinical trials initiated in the UK every year fell by more than two-fifths between 2017 and 2021.

In the US: The pharma sector alleges that the [Inflation Reduction Act] — which is estimated to produce savings worth more than $238bn in a decade — is flawed and will make it uneconomic for them to develop certain types of drugs. Paul Hudson, chief executive of Sanofi, said the act should be renamed the “innovation reduction act” and was feeding deal phobia.

4. Better, Faster, Unwanted

Despite the multitudes of vexing, complex, exigent problems that pervade mental health from small villages to global capitals, one imperative rightly sits atop every reform agenda: improving access to care.

Enter the AI therapist. One mental health non-profit recently piloted the idea and automated its online chat therapy. The AI messages were better-received and twice as fast – and the pilot failed. Why? The non-profit explains:

 Messages composed by AI (and supervised by humans) were rated significantly higher than those written by humans on their own (p < .001). Response times went down 50%, to well under a minute.

And yet… we pulled this from our platform pretty quickly. Why?

Once people learned the messages were co-created by a machine, it didn’t work. Simulated empathy feels weird, empty.

Machines don’t have lived, human experience so when they say “that sounds hard” or “I understand”, it sounds inauthentic.

5. “You Can’t Handle the Truth”

The FDA, according to economics professor Alex Tabarrok, doesn’t want you to know what’s going on inside your own body. Their “paternalistic arguments” against “new testing technology” have become the norm:

In the late 1980s, for example, the FDA simply declared that it would not approve at-home HIV tests, regardless of their safety or efficacy. As with pregnancy tests, the concern was that people could not be trusted with information about their own bodies.

The most consequential failure of the FDA to allow consumers freedom of information was the delay in approving rapid antigen tests for COVID…These tests only became available in the United States as the pandemic was slowing because the FDA regarded them as too risky for consumers and did not prioritize their approval.