Selecting an EHR is not just about the demo. But those EHR vendors sure do put a lot of focus on that demo! You need to get beyond the smoke and mirrors and consider how to use that focus to evaluate the solution as it meets your needs and requirements.
Before you even schedule any vendor demonstrations, write down your “must haves.” Can you identify your top 10 requirements?
For example, in …
How to choose an EHR after a demo
In May, I spoke at the Chronic Care and Prevention Congress about my most recent report, “Chronic Disease and the Internet.”
I talked about the social life of health information and the internet’s power to connect people with information and with each other. Living with chronic disease is associated with being offline – no surprise. What’s amazing and new is our finding that if someone can get access to the internet, …
Drug chains and the advice of online patient communities
Should doctors face consequences if they run late?
From the New York Times’ health blog, Well, comes a story where a medical group promises, “same-day appointments and longer, more personalized visits that start on time.”
Sounds good, right?
But it comes with a caveat, namely, a $199 annual membership fee. A tremendous amount of primary care can be bought with that amount of money, and if patients were willing to pay that, …
Patients can ask for discounts if the doctor is running late
The following op-ed was published on June 7th, 2010 in CNN.com.
“I read all about my condition on the Internet,” a recent patient proudly told me. Like other doctors, I’m seeing more patients research their symptoms thoroughly before setting foot in the exam room.
Patients are using the Web in unprecedented ways for their own health empowerment. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 61 percent of American adults …
Op-ed: Empowered e-patients are failed by our health system
Social and language issues dominate most of the discussion about the features of autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
A neglected area of study are the physical feature characteristics that have been known to be associated with ASD. Unlike some of the diagnostic physical changes in disorders such as Down Syndrome, physical features found in ASD are often subtle and missed by most clinicians.
Ozgen and colleagues from the Netherlands, UCLA and the UK …
Physical features of autism spectrum disorder (ASD)
by Cole Petrochko
Last week, I was sick, the kind of sick where you’re not well enough to leave the house and be productive, but not sick enough to successfully sniffle in bed and subsist entirely on chicken soup and the wishes of family. My existence during that time could have been summarized as, “Periodic bouts of achy consciousness followed by extended fever dreams about King of the Hill characters.”
Most of …
How TV promotes sugary cereals to kids during cartoons
As I’ve watched all of the media reports and videos of the oil uncontrollably gushing into the sea, the decaying marshlands, and the suffering or dead wildlife, the profound sense of sadness, anger, helplessness, and disappointment that I felt after 9/11 returned.
I don’t feel it all the time—it’s not clinical depression. It’s just strong negative emotion associated with the fact that both 9/11 and the oil spill were man-made disasters …
Oil spill got you down? Here’s what to do about it
by Joseph W. Stubbs, MD, FACP
The eighth paragraph of the modern Hippocratic Oath reads: “I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.”
Support and encouragement of prevention are deeply rooted among physicians. Intuitively, to prevent a deadly or disabling disease from occurring or stop it at an early stage seems like a bread-and-butter concept with obvious health benefits.
But it should also accrue cost savings by avoiding …
Does prevention improve health care outcomes and lower costs?
by Kristina Fiore
After combat duty in Iraq, members of the National Guard appear to have higher rates of mental health problems than soldiers in the Active Component, researchers have found.
Rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with serious functional impairment increased from about 7% to more than 12% over a nine-month period, compared with only about a 1% increase among those in the Active Component, according to Jeffrey L. Thomas, PhD, …
PTSD frequency in National Guard soldiers
As a typical guy, there are several painful illnesses that can hit our brotherhood in an instant. No warning was given. No “Get out of jail free” pass, either. Just cruising along, having another fine, healthy day, and bam! — suddenly, you are lying on the floor in severe distress.
The most feared? A testicular torsion. It can happen spontaneously. It can …
Kidney stone pain, as experienced by a man and a woman
In Journal Watch AIDS Clinical Care, we published a simple case: Clinically stable HIV+ gay man, on HIV treatment; anal pap comes back with “atypical squamous cells of undetermined significance” (ASCUS).
What to do with this result? Two experts weighed in, Howard Libman and Joel Gallant. In Howard’s thoughtful response, he acknowledges the limitations of the data thus far, but said he would refer the patient for high-resolution anoscopy (HRA) and …
Anal cancer screening in HIV+ men
by Todd Neale
Children whose mothers reported chronic abuse at the hands of an intimate partner were more likely to be obese at age 5 than those from violence-free families, researchers found.
After controlling for several potential confounders, including maternal obesity and depression, children whose mothers reported chronic violence had 1.8 times the odds of being obese, according to Renée Boynton-Jarrett, MD, ScD, of Boston University, and colleagues.
The association appeared to be …
Abuse is linked to obesity in children
Among medical specialties, some are more prestigious than others. You can generally tell which ones are more prestigious by how well they pay. Surgery and cardiology, for example, rank at the top of the prestige scale. Psychiatry and dermatology are near the bottom.
One can also ask if some diseases are considered more prestigious than others, in the opinion of doctors.
A Norwegian doctor, Dag Album, has been investigating the prestige …
Ranking prestige of medical diseases
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The Annals of Internal Medicine had a perspective article by palliative medicine communication gurus Drs. Tim Quill, Bob Arnold, and Tony Back which details an approach to discussing treatment preferences with patients who want “everything.”
When I think of a patient requesting “everything,” I typically think of it as a response to a physician who offers the patient the choice of “doing nothing” if the patient’s heart should stop or …
How to treat patients who want everything
by Todd Neale
Older U.S. veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) appear to have an increased risk of developing dementia, a retrospective study showed.
Compared with those without PTSD, predominantly male veterans with the disorder had a 1.77-fold (95% CI 1.70 to 1.85) greater risk of developing dementia, according to Kristine Yaffe, MD, of the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center and the University of California San Francisco, and colleagues.
The results were …
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may increase dementia risk
We had our dog put down yesterday.
Simon joined our family when our son was 10 years old as a two year old that we adopted from the Purdy Prison Pet Parole Program and was with us until he developed status epilepticus forcing our decision to have Simon euthanized.
Simon had been getting old, lame, nearly blind, and uncomfortable most of the time, but we felt he still had some enjoyment in …
Euthanasia in dogs and the moral lessons for doctors
An ambulance service was recently held liable for failing to “do what was necessary” before accepting emergency transport of pregnant patient.
A child was born at 25 weeks gestation — 15 weeks premature — and was not breathing. Babies born at this age have a viability of 50-70%. In other words, up to half of children born at this age of gestation die. The family called 911. The paramedics arrived, performed …
Florida EMTs may go bankrupt because of a malpractice lawsuit
by Kristina Fiore
Drinking coffee and alcohol, smoking, and lack of physical activity all appear to be associated with migraine and tension-type headaches in teenagers, researchers found.
High consumption of cocktails appeared to put students at the greatest risk for these headaches, increasing the odds almost three-and-a-half-fold, Astrid Milde-Busch, PhD, of Ludwig Maximilians University Munich in Germany, and colleagues reported online in the journal Headache.
“Rather unexpectedly, recommendations to increase fluid intake as …
Drinking and smoking associated with migraine headaches
One of the more notable findings from the special report on the TransforMED National Medical Home Demonstration project was that “patient satisfaction doesn’t automatically go up.”
Terry McGeeney, CEO of TransforMED, attributed the lack of increased patient satisfaction experienced by the 18 participating physician practices to a variety of factors, chief of which “was the turmoil of change experienced by patients as practices implemented after-hours access, quick access to laboratory results …
A medical home does not guarantee increased patient satisfaction
Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times writes about a new report from the President’s Cancer Panel calling attention to the role common chemicals may play in the development of cancer.
The overarching message is that we should be exercising much more caution in our trust of chemicals.
I am not familiar with the nuances of regulatory policies for chemicals, but (as Kristof points out) the “existing regulatory presumption [is] that …
Chemicals that cause cancer can’t be accurately studied
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