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Meet Sleuth: A pioneering guide to kids’ health
Sehreen Noor Ali is a co-founder of Sleuth, at HelloSleuth.com, a platform for parents to understand their kids’ health. She and I have been friends for several years, having met through an online group. I have been fascinated by her journey launching Sleuth. We spoke over Zoom about what Sleuth is and where it’s going. Here is our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.
JP: What is Sleuth?
Sehreen Noor Ali: Sleuth is a platform for parents to get data for every symptom and stage of their children’s health from zero to 17. It is a platform where our vision is to transform kids’ health, through crowdsourced experiences of parents.
A medspa death, an investigation and a license suspension
When a Texas woman died in the summer after receiving an infusion at a “medspa,” an investigation followed. The doctor on record as supervising the person who gave the infusion had his license suspended by the Texas Board of Medicine.
The death is an example of a growing trend: Less-qualified medical personnel doing cosmetic treatments under the often-lax supervision of a physician, sometimes with terrible consequences.
In the Texas case, Jenifer Cleveland, 47, of Fairfield, Texas, went to the Luxe Med Spa in Wortham, Texas, and received an infusion, according to the Texas Medical Board order describing the case. She became unresponsive and died at a nearby hospital on July 10. The doctor whose license was suspended on Oct. 13 was Dr. Michael Patrick Gallagher, an anesthesiologist from Frisco, Texas.
To be sure, an M.D. or a D.O. often supervises a less-qualified person — say a licensed nurse practitioner or a physician’s assistant in a family practice — who is doing tasks in the doctor’s office that can be delegated to someone with lesser qualifications. But in this case, an apparently unlicensed person performed a high-level medical procedure in a “medspa” under apparently lax supervision, and the patient died.
Do people really pay $22,000 a year for health insurance? Well, yes.
A person on the internet started explaining on Twitter that no one pays $22,000, or even near to that, for health insurance premiums. “I flatly do not believe you that you are paying $22k in premiums,” he wrote.
Then the internet started to explain how wrong he is.
“My husband and I had an Obamacare gold plan and it went up to $1390/month for two people. For family of 4, I can believe that amount. When the tax penalty came off, we switched to the private market & paid $690/month for similar coverage. Now I’m on employee coverage”
Another: “For a family with children, $1900 / month is absolutely the norm if you buy insurance on the exchanges.”
“The average annual premium for employer-sponsored health insurance in 2023 is $8,435 for single coverage and $23,968 for family coverage,” a Kaiser Family Foundation study recently said.
Charity care sparks lawsuit in Washington State
A Washington State hospital bill that was wiped out by charity care rules has resulted in a lawsuit by the state hospital association against the state health department.
The hospital bill was sent to a patient who did not live in Washington State and had “lifesaving surgery” while visiting family members in the state, said Jared Walker, founder of DollarFor, an organization that focuses on charity care.
DollarFor helped the patient apply for charity care, because their income and household size qualified for a waived bill. The hospital refused to grant the application, saying the patient was from out of state, Walker said.
So they appealed to the Washington department of health, which issued the ruling saying the residency requirement was not legal. The bill was indeed wiped away, Walker said by email, but “it was a battle.” Walker did an Instagram video describing the situation.
The Washington State Hospital Association then sued the health department to overturn the residency ruling, saying that as a result, people from around the world would flood to Washington State and ultimately drive up the cost of care for Washington residents. “That is absurd,” Walker said in his video.
What we’re reading
The “post-life department” and other (sometimes scary) mysteries of LabCorp. 404 Media.
How TikTok views “Amazon healthcare.” Buckle up. JessieJBro on TikTok. (I warned you.)
Hundreds of rural hospitals are at risk of closing. Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform.
Over-the-counter hearing aids: What’s new? Gift link from The New York Times.
Fascinating Twitter thread on the trends in residency applications for this year. Emergency medicine up, pediatrics and family medicine down.
FTC challenges drug companies for lying. Press release.
Here’s what happens when a for-profit company takes over your local ER — by a doc who worked there. The Guardian.
Medicare Advantage denials threaten rural hospitals. NBC News.
Humana says it had higher utilization in the third quarter, including more Medicare Advantage usage. Earnings report.
Hospitals want to use more pixel tracking. Who’s surprised? Press release.
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