Serving Harris, Brazoria, Fort Bend, Montgomery and Galveston Counties
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Volume 11 | Issue 5
Inside This Issue
May Edition 2021
Physician Shortages in Medical Specialties By Linda Beattie
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Houston Methodist, Rice University Launch Neuroprosthetic Collaboration See pg. 12
INDEX Legal Matters........................ pg.3 Oncology Research......... pg.5 Healthcare Real Estate... pg.6 Healthy Heart..................... pg.10
hysician shortages have been affecting America’s healthcare workforce for decades, contributing to a range of problems, from limited patient access and poorer outcomes to physician burnout. Despite ongoing efforts by many healthcare leaders and academics to sound the alarm and find long-term solutions, “there doesn’t seem to be a solution in sight,” said Andy Olson, divisional vice president of recruiting for internal medicine subspecialties at Merritt Hawkins, the nation’s leader in physician recruitment. “The physician shortage has always been part of the conversation, unfortunately,” said Olson who has worked in physician search and recruitment at Merritt Hawkins for more than 15 years. “We see the challenges every year, but sadly nothing has changed. Multiple bills have been introduced, and Merritt Hawkins’ leaders have even testified before Congress.” While Congress recently voted to add graduate medical education
funding to last year’s COVID-19 relief package and support 1,000 new residency slots, this increase will not come close to bridging the gap between physician supply and demand. The projected shortfalls in physician specialties The most recent projections from the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) in June of 2020 show that the United States could see a shortage of between 54,100 and 139,000
physicians by 2033. This would include shortfalls in both primary and specialty care. The range of physician shortages projected by 2033 include the following: • Primary care -- between 21,400 and 55,200 physicians • Nonprimary care specialties – between 33,700 and 86,700 physicians see Physician Shortage...page 14
New Discoveries of Deep Brain Simulation Put It on Par with Therapeutics Museo Medical Office Building Tops Out In Museum District See pg. 13
Possibly Speeding the Process and Allowing Personalized Treatment
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espite having remarkable utility in treating movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, deep brain stimulation (DBS) has confounded
researchers, with a general lack of understanding of why it works at some frequencies and does not at others. Now a University of Houston biomedical engineer is presenting evidence in Nature Communications Biology that electrical stimulation of the brain at higher frequencies (>100Hz) induces resonating waveforms which can successfully recalibrate dysfunctional circuits causing movement symptoms. “We investigated the modulations in local field potentials induced by electrical stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) at therapeutic and
non-therapeutic frequencies in Parkinson’s disease patients undergoing DBS surgery. We find that therapeutic high-frequency stimulation (130–180 Hz) induces high-frequency oscillations (~300 Hz, HFO) similar to those observed with pharmacological treatment,” reports Nuri Ince, associate professor of biomedical engineering. For the past couple of decades, deep brain stimulation (DBS) has see Deep Brain ... page 14
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