A new report from the AMA is out based on 12,400 responses from physicians across 31 states and 81 health systems or organizations. It looks at morale in the ranks and comes away somewhat positive.

It's a bit of a stretch to call this finding a positive, but physician burnout is below 50% for the first time in four years. In fact, comparing 2022 data with 2023 shows improvement across many areas.

While many indicators of satisfaction are up, frustration with prior authorizations (PAs) is still high. 95% of surveyed physicians say that "somewhat" or "significantly" contributes to burnout. 

Another recent report from the AMA looks at PAs specifically and just oozes with frustration. Look at these two charts about peer-to-peer (P2P) reviews of PAs.

So more than half of HCPs say that P2P reviews have increased. That isn't necessarily a bad thing. HCPs often love a good debate and a respectful professional discussion between equally qualified specialists can ensure better patient outcomes.

However, the physicians in the AMA study do not respect the "peers" (quotes usage echoes AMA report) employed by the insurance companies. Only 15% say they are qualified (the asterisk in the chart indicates a rounding error). These conversations must be challenging for the physicians enduring them.

And the hits just keep coming. When the AMA looked at the increases in costs of practices and compared them to the amounts paid by Medicare and found that they had fallen 29% over the past four years.

This effective reduction in revenue essentially puts the physicians in a place where they have to decide between the health of underserviced patients and the health of their practice. 

A new service called Undermind launched two weeks ago and it's making waves. The service uses multiple rounds of GenAI research into a topic to find scientific papers related to a query and summarize each. 

Undermind hails this as a "smart colleague" rather than an "enthusiastic intern" and that's a major differentiator if it's true. The company's comparison to Google Scholar results seems to bear this out but third party testing is needed.

To test the service we had a quick conversation with the tool and ended up with this query:

The results are presented as a ranked list of papers based on a relevance score with three AI generated categories of analysis:

As a final insight from this tool, here is the citation network from our test:

This story feels like a classic case of selection bias. MedFluencers, an HCP influencer company, has conducted a study of HCPs and gotten what look like rather skewed results:

Is this story interesting? Sure, if you're looking to understand the small subset of HCPs who also act as influencers on social media. For the general population? Likely not.

We invite the MedFluencers folks to share their methodology and full findings with us (just reply to this email -Ed.). If it's different than our interpretation we're happy to rewrite this story.

Wire readers have likely heard that Google is "saving the cookie" by scrapping plans to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome. This is portrayed as a "U-turn" and a saving of the ecosystem for advertisers. But not so fast.

Google has announced that it's not doing away with third-party cookies altogether, but instead enhancing user control over them. 

We agree with Drew Stein, CEO and founder of Audigent, quoted in SpiceWorks, that this will not stop the coming massive reductions in data to which advertisers will have to adapt.

The planning for less third-party user data needs to continue as that is still our future.

July 19th's massive Windows update issue caused by CloudStrike showed how dependent the world has become on technology. The most publicized result of the issue was in air travel but healthcare had its share of problems.

Globally, 8.5 million Windows computers were affected, many of them servers that caused issues for many companies. The estimated financial losses for these companies is a staggering $5.4 billion. That number makes sense when you see the steps that an admin must perform on every affected computer:

Obviously, these steps take time and if we assume 15 minutes per computer (that's optimistic -Ed.) with no errors (that's impossible -Ed.) that is 2.1 million hours of effort. That's a lot of effort to cram into a couple of days to get systems working again.

To commemorate the unfortunate event, and perhaps keep these issues top of mind for impatient product owners who want to release a patch on a Friday with insufficient testing, check out this petition to make July 19 "Blue Screen Day."

To end on a lighter note, here are some images of BSODs on the billboards of Times Square:

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, announced the company's long-rumored search product on Friday. It's open for a waitlist for access for personal accounts only (not company accounts). 

As an adjunct to ChatGPT we can expect explosive growth for this product before it gets folded into ChatGPT.

The excellent AI daily newsletter, The Neuron, describes the new tool:

The FDA released it's draft guidance in June and comments remain open until September. One important voice in this discussion is that of patient groups. Groups representing rare diseases are somewhat worried about unforeseen side effects of the rules. 

For anyone wanting a substantive deep dive into this draft guidance the above Friends of Cancer Research piece is extensive and highly recommended.

This year Amazon's Prime Day (really Prime Days as it's two days) amassed $14.2 billion in revenue, up 11.2% over 2023 and beating estimates.

This growth was fueled by strong demand for household items by people looking for deals and an apparent electronics refresh cycle with high numbers in those segments.

Even so, Prime Day seems to be hitting its saturation point in terms of growth.

Maybe not "saturation" since you can't expect the early growth to continue. Also, Amazon makes money through multiple channels on Prime Day (product sales, retail ads, etc.) so they likely don't mind.

Lastly, Adobe reported on growth for contributing channels. This is growth mind you, not absolute numbers which the company did not disclose.

Does Prime Day matter to pharma marketers? For those more aligned with OTC it does, and for the others it's good to see the path-to-purchase even for retail products.

Cost is a huge issue in the American healthcare system and the number of citizens who qualify as "cost secure" has dropped to 55% of the population. That number drops further to 47% for those 18-49.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, when asked about the quality of care compared to cost citizens were very negative.

This doesn't have direct applicability for most pharma marketers but it's good to remember that a large part of our audience may consider cost at or above quality when it comes to their healthcare. 

In the ranked list of industries dependent on third-party cookies for programmatic ad buys, pharma ranks eight out of 10. That's pretty good.

That is, until you see the grouping of the top eight industries. Only 6% separates them.

Advertisers from all industries still have work to do, especially since Google's announcement to keep third-party cookies still puts users in control. The experience with Apple's opt-in for app tracking is that 75% of users do not allow it.

Lawmakers are trying to change the tax rules and disallow DTC advertising in expenditures. This could have an effect on manufacturers budget plans.