Post Author: Helen Kao, MD

How a board of optometry is restricting eye care to homebound adults

Physician

September 2, 2016

This spring, the California Board of Optometry shut down the only optometrist providing services to homebound patients in the San Francisco Bay Area. I learned about this because affected patients included several referred from our UC San Francisco Housecalls program, one of a few non-profit, non-concierge home-based practices in the state providing geriatrics care to homebound adults.

With over 1 million adults homebound in California, why would any board deliberately limit …

Read more…

The inpatient, outpatient divide in patient care today

Helen Kao, MD

Physician

December 7, 2009

As the health reform debates continue, I am struck by the lack of attention to what seems to be a critical issue in poor health care delivery.

With the technologizing of medicine (and more recently the hospitalist “movement”), delivery of health care has come to be centralized around acute care hospitals. Over time, patient care has been divided into acute inpatient care and ‘ambulatory’ outpatient care. While transitions of care, hospital-at-home, …

Read more…