Author: Healthcare Propulsion Staff

One of the senior doctors who tried to raise concerns about Lucy Letby with hospital managers has told the BBC the final inquiry report makes for “grim reading”.Consultant paediatrician Dr John Gibbs worked at the Countess of Chester Hospital throughout the period in 2015 to 2016 when Letby murdered seven babies, and attempted to murder seven more, on the neonatal unit.He said that he accepted that consultants must bear “collective” responsibility for some of the failings identified in the report.”I wish we consultants had been brave enough to follow our suspicions and escalate things to the police earlier,” he told…

Roughly 1,000 pages of documents produced by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services relative to the opening months of its controversial AI prior authorization program outline sweeping issues such as delayed approvals, miscommunication and provider frustration.  Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital and privacy rights nonprofit, recently shared the documents it obtained regarding the Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction (WISeR) Model through a Freedom of Information lawsuit, filed back in March.  The trove includes participation agreements between the agency and six tech vendors, internal guidelines outlining the program and how vendors were selected for participation, status report correspondences from…

In a study analyzing nearly 3,000 brain MRI exams, researchers found that living in highly disadvantaged neighborhoods was associated with adverse brain health. Results of the study were published today in Radiology, a journal of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). “We’ve long suspected that your living environment affects your brain, but until now it’s not been proven at scale in clinical populations,” said John-Paul J. Yu, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of radiology, psychiatry, biomedical engineering and biostatistics and medical informatics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison, Wisconsin, and an associate director…

Nearly three-quarters of healthcare organizations deploy AI tools or agents without formal IT approval at least sometimes, a new Imprivata survey finds. The survey (PDF) was conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Imprivata, a provider of identity management solutions, reaching 250 U.S. healthcare leaders responsible for identity security or AI strategy across U.S. health systems, hospitals and integrated delivery networks. Some of these may have been Imprivata customers, though they were not intentionally targeted.  The survey comes at a time when organizations are increasingly implementing agentic AI in new ways, with the potential to reshape clinical and operational workflows, a…

A gift from Live Science ProThis is a Live Science Pro article that we’re putting out for free. If you liked this story, please consider subscribing.Artificial intelligence (AI) terrifies us partly because it is new and partly because it is disturbingly familiar. We have invented machines that converse, flatter, argue and improvise with uncanny fluency. Confronted by this synthetic reflection, we behave like early humans seeing a mirror for the first time: We project consciousness behind the glass, then populate it with our expected behaviors, emotions, hopes and nightmares. In other words, we scare ourselves.Today’s frontier models are impressively good…

When a virus mutates, the world usually finds out the hard way. Variants of influenza and SARS‑CoV‑2 can slip past vaccines and antibody drugs before scientists fully understand what has changed.  A new study from the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology (CCB) suggests the hard way may not be inevitable.  In a paper published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a team led by Eugene Shakhnovich, Roy G. Gordon Professor of Chemistry, and Vaibhav Mohanty, an M.D./Ph.D. student at the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Harvard-MIT Division of…

After an injury, DNA not only alters its activity but also the way it is organized spatially within the cell nucleus. In this process, certain regions of DNA establish new physical contacts through chromatin loops that act as bridges, bringing together sequences that are far apart in the genome’s linear sequence. Now, a study has identified – in an animal model – the formation of these loops as an essential step in tissue regeneration following after an injury.  The study, published in the journal Science Advances, is led by Professor Montserrat Corominas of the Faculty of Biology and the Institute…

Reading for pleasure – from tucking into a Jane Austen classic to devouring a Heartstopper graphic novel – is linked to better mental health, greater empathy and a lower risk of dementia, say researchers. Scientists at the University of Cambridge have joined with The Queen’s Reading Room – the charity founded by Her Majesty The Queen – to highlight the benefits of reading for pleasure at any age as part of the National Year of Reading. In 2025, Professor Barbara Sahakian and Dr Christelle Langley from the Department of Psychiatry at Cambridge published Brain Boost: Healthy Habits for a Happier…

Aston University has joined forces with Yorkshire-based biotechnology company Labskin to develop more realistic laboratory-grown human skin that includes immune cells. Labskin specializes in producing complex skin models that closely replicate the structure of real skin. These models – which come in thumbnail-sized sections around 1cm thick – are used by academic researchers and companies to study how products and treatments interact with the skin before they are trialled in people. However, while the models accurately reproduce the skin’s physical layers, they do not currently include immune cells, which play a crucial role in inflammation and wound healing. Under the…

Every year, an estimated 20 million people worldwide sustain a concussion or other traumatic brain injury (TBI), which leads to a two- to four-fold increase in the risk of depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Yet not everyone who experiences a TBI goes on to develop psychiatric symptoms. Now, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System have identified an antibody (immune system protein) that could make people more resilient to these conditions. They found that active-duty U.S. Marines with higher levels of the naturally-occurring anti-NMDAR1 antibody had a significantly…