How to use AI to hack medical parent paperwork
Plus: Kansas study underscores unpaid caregiving work and some Oklahoma schools resist inclusion
Nearly two years ago now (which is just WILD), I penned a piece on the ways you could use ChatGPT to simplify aspects of the medical mama life. I still use the AI chatbot all the time and find it very helpful for everything — from coming up with a recipe, to getting me started on writing an email. I think of it like a calculator — I still have to know the formula and the inputs, but it does a lot of the cognitive labor for me much faster.
This week, Axios published a story on the promise of AI to go even further in coordinating medical care for us. I would love to see a future where consumer-driven AI jumps through all the hoops that health insurance companies and social services programs put in our path! I don’t think we are there yet, and I don’t know if we ever will be, but I do think AI can be a very useful tool. Here’s an excerpt from Megan Morrone’s piece in Axios:
State of play: Early adopters are already using off-the-shelf generative AI as a personal health care assistant.
• Shasta Kearns Moore tells Axios that she uses ChatGPT to help with what she calls "navigating the high seas" of caring for her two children.
• Kearns Moore, the author of Medical Motherhood, a newsletter for people raising disabled and neurodivergent children, says she uses ChatGPT to simplify complicated test results, as well as medical and insurance forms.
• She tells Axios that she used it to "politely write an email asking for a doctor's involvement when I didn't trust another doctor to provide quality care to a disabled person," and to help her compose complaint letters.
• "It's great for families like mine who don't have the spoons to be fighting battles on two fronts," she said.
What about you? Are you using ChatGPT or other AI to simplify your medical parenting tasks? I’d love to hear your ideas!
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Medical Motherhood’s news round up
Snippets of news and opinion from outlets around the world. Click the links for the full story.
• From The Beacon: “Kansas families helping intellectually disabled kids are burnt out, doing care for free, KU study says”
Kansans helping friends or family who have intellectual disabilities are burnt out. They miss work, sometimes get a new job entirely and regularly offer daily care while paying for that help from their own pockets, a University of Kansas study said.
Those families appealed to the state for help, but the intellectual developmental disability, or IDD, waiver system has a 10-year waitlist. That program is supposed to help Kansans with intellectual disabilities — like autism — get services in their homes and communities.
[…]The KU study found that:
• 86% of caregivers help for free. Nine percent had $1,000 in monthly caregiving expenses.
• 84% of people on the waitlist need help in their community, 74% need help at home and 68% need help at work.
• 54% of people on the waitlist are in fair or poor health. Only 44% said they were in excellent health.
• 50% of people on the waitlist want to live with a parent or relative.
• 28% of caregivers with family or friends on the waitlist cared for one to three other people.
• 20% of families have no other caregiver available if they couldn’t provide support. Another 17% were not sure what would happen.
{…]The report has dozens of recommendations. It said that Kansas needs a more robust workforce so families aren’t the primary caregiver, that the state needs a system to pay family members as caregivers and that the new waiver should lift the financial assistance cap on the community support waiver, “which may not be sufficient to cover the cost of support for many on the waiver.” […]
• From The Oklahoma Council of Public Affair’s Center for Independent Journalism: “Bixby Schools Fight Parents of Special-Needs Children”
In the past year, a group of parents in the Bixby Public Schools district whose children have Down syndrome or autism have fought for their children’s rights to access a regular classroom setting as allowed by federal law.
But they say Bixby school officials have steadfastly opposed those efforts, despite years of research showing that children with disabilities benefit from inclusion in a traditional classroom with little or no downside to their typically developing peers.
An investigation by the Oklahoma State Department of Education found that Bixby failed to properly document the decision-making process that resulted in children with special needs being segregated into separate classrooms for much of the school day.
[…]After parents filed a complaint with the state, they say Bixby officials responded by portraying Down syndrome children as disruptive and even violent to keep them out of traditional classrooms.
“You shouldn’t have to sell your house and move to a different school district just for your kids to get their rights that they deserve, to find a school that’s following the laws,” said Lauree Lee, whose daughter has Down syndrome.
[…]Prior to the complaint, Whitmer said Bixby officials raved about their children.
“All of our children, they would give us these great reviews,” Whitmer said. “‘They’re so sweet.’ ‘They’re doing so well.’ ‘They don’t have behavior issues.’ They would just glow about our kids.”
But that changed after parents demanded their children receive a better education.
“They started painting our children to be a monster,” Whitmer said.
When Whitmer met with the IEP team after filing the state complaint, she said Bixby officials came with a 14-page document outlining her daughter’s alleged bad behavior, “trying to paint this picture of why she couldn’t be in gen ed.”
“Literally, only one behavior in that whole 14 pages was I like, ‘That was noteworthy,’” Whitmer said.
And that behavior occurred on only one occasion.
The other alleged problem behaviors included things like not saying “Hi,” not making eye contact at times, and lying on the floor instead of sitting on the floor.
[…]Bixby Superintendent Rob Miller said the school has worked to address the concerns raised by the parents.
“At Bixby Schools, every student matters, especially those in special education,” Miller said. “We take every parent’s concerns to heart because inclusion is at the core of our district’s values.”[…]
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I never considered this before, particularly because I am a writer and it comes easy for me. I may investigate this as a tool to save some energy in the future. If you are able to share more info regarding logistics via email, I would love to know.