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Nobody owns your EHR templates, and it shows in every note

Karan Kanwar

October 9, 2026Oct 9, 2026

A physician pulls up a patient's medication list mid-visit and stops. Something's off. The patient stopped that drug months ago, and the list never caught up. Nothing in the system flagged it; the physician just happened to notice. Ask who's…

A physician pulls up a patient’s medication list mid-visit and stops. Something’s off. The patient stopped that drug months ago, and the list never caught up. Nothing in the system flagged it; the physician just happened to notice. Ask who’s responsible for making sure that gets caught every time, and nobody has an answer.

Someone built that list years ago, correctly, for a patient who’s since moved on to a different …

Christopher H. Foster, PhD, MPA

I was wrong: Doctors who listen still exist

October 9, 2026Oct 9, 2026

The last time I wrote for KevinMD, I asked, "What happened to real care in health care?" I was tired of commercial after commercial promising that a new drug could fix nearly anything. I was frustrated by the steady stream…

The last time I wrote for KevinMD, I asked, “What happened to real care in health care?” I was tired of commercial after commercial promising that a new drug could fix nearly anything. I was frustrated by the steady stream of new labels and acronyms that sometimes make ordinary human struggles sound like conditions waiting for a prescription. That frustration was personal, but it was not entirely imagined. From …

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Measuring autism treatment progress beyond therapy hours

EarliPoint Health

October 9, 2026Oct 9, 2026

One of the things I value most in medicine is our ability to ask a seemingly simple question: Is the treatment working? In many areas of medicine, we have objective measures that help us answer it. When caring for a…

One of the things I value most in medicine is our ability to ask a seemingly simple question: Is the treatment working?

In many areas of medicine, we have objective measures that help us answer it. When caring for a child with diabetes, we can follow hemoglobin A1C. When managing hypertension, we monitor blood pressure. Those measurements do not replace the physician’s judgment or the patient’s experience. They give us another …

Can nervous system regulation reduce the pull of cravings?

Jorina Elbers, MD

October 9, 2026Oct 9, 2026

Addiction is often understood as a behavioral response to a craving. But beneath the urge to use, something else is happening: A person is trying to change how they feel. Trauma can fundamentally alter our sense of safety in the…

Addiction is often understood as a behavioral response to a craving. But beneath the urge to use, something else is happening: A person is trying to change how they feel.

Trauma can fundamentally alter our sense of safety in the world. When we don’t feel safe, the nervous system activates its innate defenses, which can leave us feeling anxious and hypervigilant, or emotionally numb and shut down. Over time, the nervous …

MaryBeth Asenime, DC, PMHNP-BC

Whole-person care starts where the specialties stop

October 9, 2026Oct 9, 2026

I have had thousands of first appointments. I knew within thirty seconds that this one was going to matter. She was not hopeful. She made that clear before she even sat down. She had been to enough offices, received enough referrals, and heard enough versions of the same answer that she had stopped expecting a different one.

She looked at me and asked directly, “Are you going to help me, or …

Hospice waits on a court order when no family can speak for you [PODCAST]

October 8, 2026Oct 8, 2026

A man is dying. He cannot speak, and no one in his life can say what he would have wanted. Kirsten Engel is a palliative medicine physician, and Medha Tripathi is a health writer and incoming Fulbright research scholar. This…

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Pradeepika Samagh, DPT, MBA

How to catch functional decline before discharge day

October 8, 2026Oct 8, 2026

We know when a patient's laboratory values have improved. We know when the infection has cleared, the fracture has been repaired, or the heart failure has stabilized. But before declaring treatment successful, we should ask a more ordinary and often…

We know when a patient’s laboratory values have improved. We know when the infection has cleared, the fracture has been repaired, or the heart failure has stabilized. But before declaring treatment successful, we should ask a more ordinary and often more consequential question:

Can this person safely get out of bed?

Too often, health care discovers the answer only when discharge is approaching. Rehabilitation is then asked to solve, in a matter …

Can independent medical judgment survive AI in medicine?

Sean C. Domnick, JD

October 8, 2026Oct 8, 2026

Every few weeks, another headline asks whether artificial intelligence is about to replace physicians. I doubt it. Patients don't want to hand the most important conversations of their lives to a computer. Doctors didn't spend years training to become little…

Every few weeks, another headline asks whether artificial intelligence is about to replace physicians. I doubt it. Patients don’t want to hand the most important conversations of their lives to a computer. Doctors didn’t spend years training to become little more than supervisors of software. Medicine has always been, and should remain, a profoundly human profession.

But I do think we’re asking the wrong question. The real question isn’t whether AI …

Physician voices

Good trouble: lessons from a physician whistleblower

Ronald L. Lindsay, MD

October 8, 2026Oct 8, 2026

Rep. John Lewis nearly lost his life on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, marching for rights that should never have required a march. His courage redefined the moral calculus of resistance, what he called "good trouble, necessary trouble." I've…

I’ve created trouble too. Not on bridges, but in boardrooms. Not with batons overhead, but with data, dissent, and quiet refusal. I’ve challenged supervisors, disrupted systems, and questioned protocols that harmed more …

AI deskilling in medicine: lessons from Air France 447

Colin G. Knight, MD

October 8, 2026Oct 8, 2026

In 2021, at four endoscopy centers in Poland, endoscopists got a new tool to aid in colonoscopies. A computer equipped with an artificial intelligence watched the video alongside them and highlighted anything that looked like a polyp. The centers were part of a trial, so, as part of the study, the doctors had access to the tool on some days and not on others. This variability allowed researchers a chance …

Health policy

Workplace violence in health care needs a national standard

Isabella Hower, MOT

October 8, 2026Oct 8, 2026

My foot slid on something wet as I entered the medical/surgical unit. Glancing down, I wondered vaguely who had spilled cranberry juice before registering the red droplets for what they were: blood. I looked over my shoulder and froze. A…

My foot slid on something wet as I entered the medical/surgical unit. Glancing down, I wondered vaguely who had spilled cranberry juice before registering the red droplets for what they were: blood.

I looked over my shoulder and froze. A patient stood in the deserted hallway, blood streaking his arm from where he appeared to have ripped out an IV. A pair of bandage scissors hung loosely in his hand.

I ran …

Should good faith immunity cover trained clinicians?

Erin Daugherty, RN

October 8, 2026Oct 8, 2026

The high-profile Take Care of Maya case, chronicled in the Netflix documentary, placed the complex legal doctrines of qualified immunity and good faith immunity directly into the public spotlight. While a jury initially awarded the Kowalski family $261 million in damages (later reduced to $213.5 million) against Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital for claims including false imprisonment, medical negligence, and wrongful death, a Florida appellate court overturned the verdict. The …

Physician voices

Physician leaders at the bedside see what dashboards miss

Manoj Sreedharan, MD

October 8, 2026Oct 8, 2026

Some of the most useful information I get as a medical director does not come from a dashboard or a meeting. It comes from working a clinical shift. When you are seeing patients alongside the people affected by the processes…

Some of the most useful information I get as a medical director does not come from a dashboard or a meeting. It comes from working a clinical shift.

When you are seeing patients alongside the people affected by the processes you help oversee, problems become difficult to ignore. You see where the workflow slows down, where responsibilities are unclear, and where a seemingly simple administrative change creates extra work. That is …

Biomarker testing can find the mutation driving your cancer

Gene Uzawa Dorio, MD

October 8, 2026Oct 8, 2026

"What was cancer, Grandpa?" These were words I hoped to hear from my grandchildren. As a practicing physician for over forty-five years, I wasn't sure whether futuristic care would include finding a cure for cancer. But that time has arrived.…

“What was cancer, Grandpa?” These were words I hoped to hear from my grandchildren. As a practicing physician for over forty-five years, I wasn’t sure whether futuristic care would include finding a cure for cancer. But that time has arrived.

Unfortunately, this realization came from personal experience as my wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer four years ago. Initially in 2022, we thought it was a slow-growing thyroid cancer that would …

Clinical informatics is not about the technology

Thomas Powell, MD

October 8, 2026Oct 8, 2026

I have asked the same question in a lot of hospitals, and I have never once received a good answer. Name the three largest technology investments your organization made in the last five years. Now say what clinical outcome each…

I have asked the same question in a lot of hospitals, and I have never once received a good answer.

Name the three largest technology investments your organization made in the last five years. Now say what clinical outcome each one was meant to change, whether it changed, and whether anyone even checked.

The room usually goes completely quiet. Not because the leadership are careless. Most of them are serious, and many …

Health policy

How Medicare Advantage prior authorization delays care

Adam Lee

October 8, 2026Oct 8, 20262

Medicare Advantage has become one of the most important parts of the American health care system. Designed as a privately administered alternative to traditional Medicare, the program allows insurers to manage coverage for older adults while receiving payments from the federal government. Supporters argue that Medicare Advantage can reduce unnecessary spending while giving seniors access to benefits that traditional Medicare may not fully provide.

Yet recent scrutiny has raised a more …

Signs of depression families miss, and the stigma behind it [PODCAST]

October 7, 2026Oct 7, 2026

Someone you love says they are fine. They still eat, they still go to work, and no one asks a second time. Nneka Oluoha is an internal medicine physician and the author of a novel about a Nigerian immigrant living…

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Health policy

Pharmacy benefit managers and the price no one can see

Matt Hasan, PhD

October 7, 2026Oct 7, 2026

A physician writes a prescription believing the clinical decision has been made. In reality, another decision-making process is just beginning. Between the prescription and the patient sits an increasingly powerful infrastructure of pharmacy benefit managers, insurers, formularies, rebate agreements, pharmacy…

A physician writes a prescription believing the clinical decision has been made. In reality, another decision-making process is just beginning.

Between the prescription and the patient sits an increasingly powerful infrastructure of pharmacy benefit managers, insurers, formularies, rebate agreements, pharmacy networks, prior authorization rules, and specialty pharmacies. Most physicians see only fragments of this system. Patients usually understand even less.

The result is a peculiar form of American medicine: The person making …