Health care research’s next frontier

A laboratory floating 250 miles above Earth is opening new frontiers in health care.

So says NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, who joined astronauts this week on the International Space Station via video link to share updates on experiments performed in the great beyond — and to shed light on what they might do for us on our planet.

What’s new? Doctors may soon be able to perform surgeries on the space station using remote-controlled robots.

Last week, surgeons at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln directed a robot to grasp, pull and cut a series of rubber bands in a simulated surgical setting. Even with the signal travel delays that accompany Earth-to-space communication, the procedure was successful.

The robots portend a future where astronauts in need of medical procedures could get them done safely in space. That’s critical for deep space exploration.

And on Earth: Scientists believe the robots could eventually prove useful in places where surgeons are few, such as remote areas and war zones.

More to come: The astronauts have many more projects underway, including research on bone loss and the growth of protein crystals that are useful in cancer research.

This is where we explore the ideas and innovators shaping health care.

San Francisco officials want to provide universal access to free substance use disorder recovery books. They are the most stolen literature at local public libraries, AP reports.

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As the health sector rushes to implement AI, its executives need to be aware of blind spots when putting the technology into practice, a new report from Deloitte argues.

How’s that? When the consulting firm asked health leaders about their outlook for AI, they raised some familiar concerns, including the tech’s availability and reliability plus its legal and privacy implications.

The leaders focused less on mitigating bias, educating patients on using the technology or making AI tools accessible to all demographics.

Game plan: To guard against overlooking those blind spots, health care executives need effective systems to govern AI use — from data use and bias to privacy and reliability, the consultants said.

Leaders of health systems should also, as a group, spend more time thinking about the tech’s end users, the report said. How patients and health professionals will use AI and what they want from it is too often ignored in rolling out tools, the authors argue, which could threaten the massive gains promised by AI in health care.

Women burn out in health care professions significantly more often than men, studies have shown over the years. A new review of a large body of research, published in Global Advances in Integrative Medicine and Health, looks at the factors behind the disparity.

How’s that? Researchers from the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences reviewed 71 studies conducted in 26 countries from 1979 to- 2022. They found a number of possible reasons women burn out more often.

Gender inequality in the workplace could be a driver of the uneven burnout rates. The data suggested women were often given more demanding workloads with less autonomy than men.

The imbalance followed women beyond the workplace, the authors said, since women often bear most of the burden for childcare and other responsibilities in the home.

What to do about it: The researchers suggested several strategies that could help lessen the disparity and improve the well-being of health workers.

Supportive work environments that offer performance recognition, flexible scheduling, vacation leave and professional development opportunities were key to preventing or overcoming burnout, the study said.