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| The availability of low-cost generic drugs is usually seen as a boon to patients. If you have health insurance, your copays will be lower compared to name brand meds, and you probably won’t have to deal with a drawn-out prior authorization process. If you don’t have insurance, you might even be able to pay cash for your medicine.
But there’s a downside – one that community college professor Laura Bray discovered when the hospital ran out of her 9-year-old daughter’s leukemia medication, a drug that cost just $10.
Once drugs run out of their patents they can be manufactured and sold as generics. And in a market where 90% of drugs taken around the country are generic, that’s caused a race to the bottom in prices. Manufacturers are leaving the generics market, going out of business, and cutting corners, all of which contributes to shortages.
Bray ended up launching a one-woman triage operation to save patients from the fallout of a broken generic drug market, as NPR's Yuki Noguchi reports.
To find medication for her daughter, Bray called hundreds of children’s hospitals looking for supply to share, "then just duct-taping together solutions," says Bray. "It's insane."
Then she started getting calls from other parents and patients. In the past four years, she’s become an intermediary for patients and hospitals, getting to know drugmakers and even becoming a go-to for the FDA. Bray founded the non-profit Angels for Change, and is advocating for industry and policy reform.
Read Laura Bray’s remarkable story, and learn about what could be done to resolve the drug shortage crisis.
Plus: Facing cancer? Here's when to consider experimental therapies, and when not to
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If you’ve ever had a persistent medical problem, or even been a patient at a busy primary care practice, it often feels like you never get enough time with your doctor. Dr. Michael Mansour, an infectious disease specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital, says he’d like to spend more time with his patients, too. And he’s hopeful that AI will help him do that.
As GBH’s Craig LeMoult reports, Mansour, who specializes in fungal infections, is beta-testing an AI upgrade to the medical search engine UpToDate. UpToDate can be thought of as Google for doctors, and like Google, a search query can lead to a broad array of results. Mansour thinks that generative AI could help him find more specific results and cut down on search time when it comes to diagnosing an infection.
Doctors like June-Ho Kim are excited about AI’s potential ability to comb through patient medical records – which can span decades – for relevant information, and summarize that information for clinicians. Dr. Kim says the technology could help primary care doctors address more patient issues without specialist referrals.
"It will free up specialist time to focus on the more complex cases that they need to really [home] in on, rather than the ones that could be answered through a few questions," he says.
What will this mean for doctors who want to remain old-school? "AI won't replace doctors, but doctors who use AI will replace doctors who do not," says Dr. Marc Succi, a radiologist who co-authored a study that tested the diagnostic ability of ChatGPT.
Still, those testing medical AI are flagging errors – such as when UpToDate’s AI cited a study that didn’t exist. (But at least it came clean when asked “Did you make this up?”!)
Learn about how AI could help human doctors help patients.
Listen: Where AI helps and hurts in health care |
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We hope you enjoyed these stories. Find more of NPR's health journalism on Shots.
All the best,
Andrea Muraskin and your NPR Health editors |
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