by Toni Bigby
Lately there has been a lot of conversation around patient empowerment – an ambiguous term, but one that is fodder for many conversations across the health care industry. Patient empowerment – to put it simply – is about providing the necessary tools and information to a patient so that he or she can take a more active and involved position in his or her health …
Do patients want to be empowered or managed?
by Lucas Restrepo, MD
Recently, the fire department of a small town in Tennessee called South Fulton ignored the call of a man who needed help quelling a fire near his house.
The firefighters declined lending a hand because the caller neglected to pay a $75 bill, the prerequisite for deserving assistance. The caller tried to put down the fire with a garden hose, but …
Covering the uninsured and the costs to society
Something recently stopped me in my tracks.
A study published in Pediatrics recently found that 65% of parents to 3 year-olds said they had spanked their child within the last month. Sixty five percent? The number surprised me. If you’d asked me to guess, I would have said 20-25%. Talk about way off. Another reminder of how much I have to learn.
The study evaluated risk factors, including domestic violence and intimate …
Spanking your kids and corporal punishment
Though I’ve spoken about breast cancer for Susan G. Komen for the Cure (emphasizing the importance of early screening and detection), until recently I had never had a mammogram. In my training I’d been taught that mammograms weren’t that accurate or useful in women under 40 (our health system’s protocols reflect that), so I got regularly checked by my physician whenever I had a physical and otherwise was waiting until …
What would you do if you had a year left to live?
I am teaching a new course entitled “Turning your Clinical Cases into Scholarly Work.”
I hope to draw on my own experiences through the years mentoring students and residents in writing up several clinical cases, but also in making diagnoses. In preparing for this course, I have also learned quite a bit about the controversy surrounding case reports and the challenges that they face in today’s healthcare system.
Unfortunately, case reports have …
Case reports continue to be an important part of journal publication
I understand the frustration and anger in CNN Senior Medical Correspondent Elizabeth Cohen’s new book, The Empowered Patient. I agree that all of the horrible patient stories should have never occurred. As a practicing primary care doctor who has witnessed near misses and bad medical outcomes affect family members, I too wrote a book encouraging patients to be informed and engaged about their care.
The problem is that The Empowered …
Is The Empowered Patient too adversarial?
More Americans are overweight and out of shape than ever before. Their sedentary, high-calorie lifestyles are causing an epidemic of obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, and degenerative arthritis among other preventable conditions. If those aren’t bad enough, obesity and a sedentary lifestyle also raise the risk of breast cancer, colon cancer, and other common forms of cancer.
Doctors all across the nation are struggling to treat these lifestyle-induced conditions with …
Coaches can help with lifestyle goals in a way that doctors cannot
In our clinical years, our medical school has instituted a program in which we do learning modules along with our in hospital experience and didactics.
I was happy to see a module on empathy for my second month of surgery. The last question to be answered in this module was: “Although the studies on empathy are very consistent other authors have indicated that medical students are really not losing cognitive empathy, …
Empathy cannot be simply turned on and off
In Quality Measures and the Individual Physician, Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD questions the usefulness of feedback report cards for individual providers. She states, “Only 33% of my patients with diabetes have glycated hemoglobin levels that are at goal. Only 44% have cholesterol levels at goal. A measly 26% have blood pressure at goal. All my grades are well below my institution’s targets.”
It would be better for Dr. Ofri’s patients if …
Doctors should embrace feedback and learn from it
At a recent staff meeting, a colleague mentioned her client was at an “awkward age”.
I thought she was referring to a teenager, but she quickly clarified herself. She was referring to the age before someone is old enough for Medicare at sixty five, an awkward time indeed. Many people between the ages of fifty to sixty four find that relatively minor health problems make health insurance unaffordable. For those with …
Providing Medicare to everybody increases continuity of coverage
February 2010 was a fortuitous month for me. My website went live, and I met Ed Bennett.
Ed is director of web strategy at the University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS). Lucky for UMMS. In his more than 15 years working on the internet, Ed’s been programmer, designer, consultant, information architect, start-up participant. Since 1999, Ed has led the UMMS web strategy building out large (50,000 page) content-rich …
Social media is as important as the web itself
Blockbuster drugs. They are, to this day, an addiction for big pharma. A blockbuster can produce a huge ROI and fund the development of new drugs and new marketing programs but today the deck is stacked against blockbuster drugs.
The healthcare environment today is one in which cost containment is a key element. In the next few years a lot of blockbuster drugs are going to come off patent including Lipitor, …
Blockbuster drugs are an addiction for Big Pharma
Health care workers throughout the country daily face the growing pains of the transition from paper charts to electronic medical systems. Not only are there frustrations within each system, every hospital seems to have selected a different EMR. When I was a medical student at UCSD, I was exposed to 4 separate EMR’s (Epic, PCIS, CPRS, Centricity, etc) during my rotations at various San Diego hospitals.
In this Wild West era …
How health care could benefit if a company followed Apple
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Well, it happened again. Recently, I was somewhere over Saskatchewan, returning from a lovely Mediterranean cruise, in that uncomfortable semi-conscious state that passes for sleep when you’re flying coach, when the airplane’s PA system rang out:
“If there’s a doctor on board, please ring your call button!”
If you’re old enough to remember the show “To Tell the Truth,” you know what happened next. In the show, four B-list celebrity …
If there’s a doctor on board, please ring your call button!
by Winston F. Mitchell
I’m a 53 year-old male with no history of hypertension, no cholesterol problems and glucose count normal.
I was overweight but still in great physical shape. But over a period of weeks, walking to work, I started experiencing a shortness of breath. Finally I went to my doctor, he informed me he was going to admit me to the hospital immediately because a …
10 things you need to know before surgery and during the hospital stay
Recently, reports about deceptive marketing and other questionable practices used by the growing for-profit higher education industry in the US appeared in the news. For example, per Bloomberg:
Recruiters at U.S. for-profit colleges lied to entice students and encouraged them to commit fraud to qualify for aid, a report by the Government Accountability Office found.
Recruiters at all 15 colleges studied by the GAO, Congress’s investigational arm, misled potential students about the …
Deceptive marketing is widespread in health care
by Jon Meyer
Looking at the industry response to the recent study released by the Center for Studying Health System Change, Physicians Slow to E-mail Routinely with Patients – Issue Brief No. 134, it appears that a piece of the puzzle is missing. Both the study, and the analysis, put the physician at the center of the email debate. In reality, about 30% of a medical practice’s communication is from the …
Physician email implementation inertia
I am going to explain a bit about why physicians should care about online reputation management (ORM).
As the online world becomes more pervasive, reputations are increasingly built and managed on the Internet. Online Reputation Management is the process of monitoring, addressing or mitigating SERPs (search engine result pages) or mentions in online and …
Why physicians should care about online reputation management
Every year US News & World Report publishes its rankings of the nation’s top 50 hospitals. Hospital administrators await this top 50 report with a tension and fervor that rivals the NFL first-draft pick.
As soon as the report is released, snippets rocket their way into donor appeals, local hospital signage, and highway billboards. “Ranked X by US News & World Report” becomes a descriptor that is supposed to …
US News hospital rankings too subjective and encourage self-promotion
Oncology is the area where the health care cost conundrum is coming into sharpest focus. Theoretically, who wouldn’t spend whatever it takes to cure a life-threatening disease? And yet practically the costs of new treatments are so high, and the improvements usually modest enough, that when it comes right down to it costs are becoming a real issue for patients and doctors.
An interesting article in the Journal of Clinical Oncology …
Comparative effectiveness research needs to be taught to doctors and patients
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