Originally posted in HCPLive.com
by Jeff Brown, MD
When I am in a civilian situation and someone asks me what I do, if I am feeling whimsical, I sometimes answer “I’m in sales.”
Think about it – almost all of our professional interchanges can be seen as: 1) trying to talk someone out of doing something, like smoking, or 2) trying to talk someone into something, like exercising. Using a broader brush, you …
Teaching doctors the art of negotiation
We’ve gotten some questions from our readers on iMedicalApps.com asking if medical applications in the App Store will work just as well on the iPod touch as they do on the iPhone.
The short answer to this question is, yes, they will. The long answer is you should know some key differences.
Of the approximately 60 million total iPhone and …
iPhone medical apps for your iPod Touch
Last week, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) released criteria that will be used to certify EHRs as appropriate support tools for providers who want to qualify for Bonanza Days.
The criteria are subject to a 60-day comment period before being finalized.
I congratulate ONC on its elegant piece of rule making. Its so-called Interim Final Rule (IFR) provides a foundation that can support years of progress …
Did the government get it right on EHR certification?
General medicine is not sexy. Less than a fourth of the doctors in the United States are currently primary care providers like Pediatricians, Ob/Gyns, and Internists. According to a recent study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association, only 2% of medical students intend on pursuing a career in general internal medicine. So when health-care reform becomes a reality, and the 46 million uninsured men, women, and children …
Primary care needs a face lift, and a better agent
Originally published in MedPage Today
by Charles Bankhead, MedPage Today Staff Writer
Primary care physicians rarely discuss organ donation with patients, even though most of the doctors believe organ donation is within the scope of their practice, a survey of primary care physicians showed.
Fewer than 4% of physicians said they discussed organ donation with patients, compared with 30% who discussed end-of-life issues. …
Primary care doctors should discuss organ donation with patients
I’m an ideological pragmatist. I believe in what works and what suits the temperament of American people, rather than what is politically correct or what passes some moral litmus test.
Whatever reform measure passes, it will be a public-private mix and will superimpose more government regulations on our private system. It will have uneven effects. It will cost more than the status quo. And it will expose the reality, that when …
How ideology is shaping health care reform
By all accounts, Frances Vasquez ought to be a diabetic. Raised on a diet of fried steak, fried pork chops and lots of rice, her father, mother, and two sisters suffered from the disease. At age 47, Frances was overweight and already experiencing high blood sugar.
But over the past 11 years, Frances has been able to avoid diabetes, and her sugars are now normal. By participating in a ground-breaking, government-funded …
How to prevent diabetes with diet and exercise
Originally published in MedPage Today
by Crystal Phend, MedPage Today Senior Staff Writer
Telling people about the benefits of quitting is more likely to help smokers break the habit than scaring them with the dangers of continuing, researchers found.
Callers to a tobacco quitline were nearly twice as likely to stop in the short term when they got positive messages rather than …
Why scaring patients to quit smoking may not be effective
In case you haven’t heard, in a stunning result in yesterday’s special election in Massachusetts, Republican Scott Brown won the Senate seat previously occupied by the late Edward Kennedy.
Needless to say, pundits are going crazy analyzing the results, and its implications on health reform. I’ll leave the political commentary to them, but I’ll comment on what this means for health reform’s future.
In essence, what turned into a 95% likelihood …
Did Martha Coakley kill health reform, and what Senator Scott Brown means for healthcare
by Jonathan Crocker, MD
From Cange, Central Plateau
Haiti
01-18-10
We arrived at Cange, in the Central Plateau, the heart of operations for Partners In Health/Zamni Lasante, yesterday. As we expected, things are incredibly busy. People are still arriving from Port au Prince. Those who have been fortunate enough to survive their injuries this long are now running into complications of wound infections, some of which have turned septic, and venous blood clots (from …
A doctor writes about his first day in Haiti
The following is part of a series of original guest columns by the American College of Physicians.
by Steven Weinberger, MD, FACP
At times of calendar transitions, e.g., at the onset of a new year or a new decade, the popular press often takes a broad view in looking retrospectively at the outstanding or defining events and people of the past …
ACP: 10 major challenges that confront medical education over the next decade
Originally published in HCPLive.com
by Ed Rabinowitz
When it comes to negotiating fees with health plans, practices and physicians have more leverage than they realize. The problem, says John Schmitt, a managed care expert with EthosPartners Healthcare Management Group, is that practices often don’t even try. “Groups negotiate an agreement with a payor and then, for whatever reason, just file it away. Most medical groups do not have a good, proactive methodology …
Tips for doctors who negotiate reimbursement rates with insurance companies
Hospitals face so many urgent tasks in safety – computerize, promote teamwork, implement evidence-based safety practices, discover unsafe conditions – that it’s hard to know where to start. If you’re struggling, I recommend that you put your Root Cause Analysis enterprise on steroids. This is what we did at UCSF Medical Center, and it was the most important change we’ve made in our safety journey. Here’s the story, …
How root cause analysis can improve patient safety
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Originally published in HCPLive.com
by Gwenn Schurgin O’Keeffe, MD, FAAP
New technologies can make healthcare more personalized, strengthen the patient–physician relationship, put the right information in the right hands at the right time, and potentially improve outcomes and efficiency across the healthcare spectrum. So why are so many physicians reluctant to embrace these changes?
Wikipedia defines Health 2.0 as “the use of a …
Why doctors fail to embrace Health 2.0
Originally published in MedPage Today
by Michael Smith
I remember walking through the squalid downtown of Port-au-Prince and coming across a woman sitting by the roadside selling carefully washed tin cans. That was how she made her meager living.
There were scenes that were more appalling — a man on a street corner with his head split open by a machete, a corpse …
Scenes from Haiti before the earthquake, and what the future holds
Most of us went into medicine because, in addition to being good students, we wanted to help people. How many oceans of ink and forests of paper have been used explaining that point to admissions committees we’ll never know. Suffice it to say, it felt very good when our professors wrote us glowing letters of recommendation. Of course, we were also saying, “I want to feel good about helping people. …
Good doctors sometimes may make patients unhappy
Originally published in MedPage Today
by Marianne Mattera
Trust is an essential element in the doctor-patient relationship.
You’re well aware of how important it is that you can trust the history the patient gives you. You know the problems that can arise in planning and managing care if you’re working with only part of the story. And you probably even feel a twinge …
How a doctor’s office can affect patient trust
How many physicians do you know who have chosen to leave their clinical practice?
There’s no doubt that physicians are getting burned out. Many are tired of fighting insurance companies and even more physicians are getting discouraged about reductions in reimbursement. This has caused some physicians to drop Medicare and Medicaid. Others have switched to cash-only or concierge/boutique practice models. Then you have your group of physicians who have simply decided …
How doctors can look for the right non-clinical medical job
Originally published in MedPage Today
by John Gever, MedPage Today Senior Editor
Psychiatrists who prescribe drugs for their patients today usually give more than one at a time, often with little scientific basis, researchers said.
About 60% of patients with psychiatrist office visits leading to a drug prescription received at least two medications in 2005-2006, according to government survey data analyzed by Ramin …
How psychiatrists may be giving their patients too many drugs
Ms. FR didn’t look so great even when I first met her. She had been admitted to the hospital three times in past 6 weeks for nausea/vomiting and generalized malaise. While the cause of her acute illness was not entirely clear, we suspected that her widely metastatic breast cancer had something to do with it.
By the time I met her she had already been in the hospital for 1 week. …
How bad patient outcomes affect physicians
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