Medical Journal March 2026 Digital Edition
April 1, 20261 min
Post Views: 1,872
BY Jerry Bruno, Principal, Bill Fera, Principal, Jeanette Yung, Principal, Michael McCallen, Managing Director, Dr. Jay Bhatt, Managing Director, Maulesh Shukla, Executive Manager, Health Care Sector, Deloitte Health care leaders are under continued pressure to reduce operational costs, stabilize a strained workforce, and improve access and experience. While artificial intelligence has the potential to be transformative, many organizations report incremental gains, often slowed by organizational and implementation hurdles rather than a lack of use...
SB 922 and the Cures Act: Practical guidance for managing sensitive test results in EHR systems
April 1, 202611 min
BY Jordan T. Vogel, Esq., and Phuong D. Nguyen, Esq., Brown & Fortunato, P.C. Last year, we wrote about the information blocking provisions of the 21st Century Cures Act (“Cures Act”) and an available three-day exception to the Cures Act’s immediate electronic release requirements applicable to certain test results under Texas Senate Bill 922 (“SB 922”). To build on these concepts, this article addresses the scope of SB 922 and practical guidance for implementing electronic health...
What are the health benefits of shockwave therapy?
April 1, 20266 min
BY Samuel Mathis MD A therapeutic option that has recently caught my interest is the use of extracorporeal shockwave therapy (EWST). Extracorporeal shockwave therapy works by delivering high-energy acoustic pulses to the body. These pulses (or shockwaves) work to breakdown scar tissues and calcification, encourage growth of new blood vessels, promote production of collagen, and decrease inflammatory markers. This therapy has been available since 2020 and has recently experienced increased attention for its effects...
Planting the seeds for 2027: Stay engaged in the interim.
April 1, 20266 min
BY John Hawkins At Austin’s most well-known building, plenty of important work happens when most of Texas isn’t paying much attention. In even-numbered years, when the Texas Legislature isn’t in session, our state lawmakers still have plenty to do at the Capitol – and so does the Texas Hospital Association. That’s when legislative committees study specific topics – known as interim charges – that lay the groundwork for what’s to come when the...
Targeted treatments plus engineered immune cells may slow early spread of triple negative breast cancer, study reveals
April 1, 20263 min
A new study has revealed a promising new approach to curb the spread of triple‑negative breast cancer, one of the most aggressive and difficult‑to‑treat forms of the disease. Dan Duda, Ph.D., scientific director of transplant oncology and therapeutics at Houston Methodist Research Institute, and his research team discovered pairing targeted treatments with CAR T‑cell therapy may help control cancer recurrence when intervention options are otherwise limited. CAR T‑cells are immune cells engineered in the laboratory to recognize and attack cancer. While they have worked well in some blood cancers, success in solid tumors such as breast cancer has been more...
Combination treatment benefits patients with advanced breast cancer that has spread to brain
April 1, 20261 min
Patients with leptomeningeal metastasis (LM) have historically had few treatment options. Now, researchers have found a combination of targeted therapies, tucatinib and trastuzumab, plus the chemotherapy drug, capecitabine, may improve symptoms and extend survival in some breast cancer patients with LM. The Phase II study included 17 female patients with newly diagnosed LM and HER2+ breast cancer. Median overall survival (OS) in those treated with the combination therapy increased from a historical average of 4.4...
Dual targeting approach improves immunotherapy response in glioblastoma
April 1, 20261 min
Researchers found that simultaneously blocking two key “don’t eat me signals” found in cancer cells heightens the immune response and sensitizes tumors to immunotherapy in models of glioblastoma (GBM), highlighting a promising strategy. The study was co-led by Wen Jiang, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of Radiation Oncology, and Betty Kim, M.D., Ph.D., professor of Neurosurgery and core member of the James P. Allison Institute™. Low testosterone levels may be associated with an increased risk of...
Researchers developed a new computational approach designed to better account for changes in gene expression within tumors relative to their unique microenvironments. This approach outperformed current methods for predicting chemotherapy response in patients with triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC). The new tool, developed by Wenyi Wang, Ph.D., professor of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, and colleagues, aims to improve upon similar methods to predict treatment responses using an approach known as deconvolution, which involves breaking down, calculating...
New Houston Methodist study shows how AI can assist clinicians in identifying high-risk patients with bloodstream infection and offer better chance of survival
April 1, 20264 min
Bloodstream infections (BSI) can turn deadly fast, particularly for patients with weakened immune systems. A new study from Houston Methodist Research Institute finds that artificial intelligence can assist clinicians in identifying previously unseen patterns of infection inpatients and save lives. Led by Masayuki Nigo, M.D., associate professor in the Department of Medicine at Houston Methodist, the study was published in the American Journal of Transplantation and used an unsupervised machine learning model to identify...