P. Dileep Kumar is a board-certified practicing hospitalist specializing in internal medicine. Dr. Kumar is actively engaged with professional associations such as the American College of Physicians, Michigan State Medical Society, and the American Medical Association. He has held a variety of leadership roles and has authored more than 100 publications in various medical journals and a book on rabies (Biography of Disease Series). Additionally, he has presented more than 50 papers at various national and international medical conferences. Several of his papers are widely cited in the literature and referenced in various textbooks.
Dr. Kumar has been involved in various hospital committees with advanced knowledge of Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) initiatives such as meaningful use, value-based purchasing, and Accountable Care Organizations.
Furthermore, Dr. Kumar has served as a scientific peer reviewer for various medical journals, including the British Medical Journal, Annals of Internal Medicine, American Journal of Cardiology, Physician Leadership Journal, and European Journal of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases.
Primary care providers and primary care medicine are on the downswing in the U.S., burdened with increasing demands of documentation and numerous complicated quality programs in the face of rapidly diminishing reimbursements. While the tribe is disappearing fast, enter its newest nemesis: artificial intelligence (AI).
You might wonder why AI is detrimental to primary care and primary care physicians. The common notion is that physicians, including primary care physicians, will be …
Read more…
Will AI replace primary care physicians?
Amidst the recent news about the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO, the issue of prior authorization has come to the forefront again. Insurance companies use prior authorization as an easy tool to control the costs and incorporate it as a genuine step of the health care delivery process. The recent trend is to use AI (artificial intelligence) for prior authorizations. AI offers several advantages over human workers, further saving time and …
Read more…
AI in health care: the black box of prior authorization
Half a dozen brick steps from the side road led directly to the emergency room (ER). The hospital building resembled a thin strip of warehouse in the middle of a remote small town. A couple of ill patients occupied the beds in the tiny ER. A room beyond the ER served as the intensive care unit (ICU), where the ER doctors frequently checked on patients. The ICU’s location was a …
Read more…
The collapse of rural health care: Why small-town hospitals are closing
Alaska Air Flight 1282 was on a trip from Portland to Ontario, California, on January 5, 2024. Barely six minutes into the flight, passengers heard a loud bang and a whoosh as the door plug in the middle section of the aircraft blew out. An unused exit door in the mid-part of the aircraft’s main cabin detached and fell out of the sky. One of the passengers sitting close to …
Read more…
The Alaska Air Flight 1282 door blowout and patient safety
Do masks prevent COVID-19 infections? You might be thinking that it is a bit late to ponder these questions. But better late than never! As shown in the following graph provided by the CDC, COVID is here to stay with us, at least for the time being. Even though nothing compared to the 140,000 hospitalizations per week during the early 2022 wave, there were still about 40,000 weekly hospitalizations a …
Read more…
Beyond medical vs. N95: strategic masking for COVID protection
Monkeypox has been in the news since May 2022. Barely recovering from the anxieties of COVID-19, the natural question in our mind is how is this all going to play out? We might not have accurate predictions yet, but almost six months into the outbreak, we have more information that we can rely on.
The graphs below show the number of confirmed monkeypox cases on a daily basis and on a …
Read more…
Where are we going with monkeypox?
You have seen those harrowing pictures. Patients dying outside the hospitals while waiting for a bed. People on oxygen masks gasping for air-sharing beds. Dead bodies piling up in morgues. Overstretched crematoriums and burial grounds. COVID-19 hit India very hard in April 2021. This is the second wave of disease in the country. They largely escaped the first wave and were confident by the end of 2020 that they had …
Read more…
The COVID-19 tragedy in India: a caution to other countries
COVID-19 is the first-ever “politicized pandemic” in human history. COVID-19 happened in an era of widespread social media which helped the general population to understand the disease better and faster. However, the public also formulated an opinion about it. The problem was that their opinions were distilled by the information they were exposed to. And a large chunk of the information available was not scrutinized or scientifically proven.
This is a …
Read more…
Does your reaction to COVID reveal your political leaning?
Dr. Anthony Fauci looks tired. His voice is raspy at times. He has become the face of resistance to the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. He is present at the daily White House briefings and various networks throughout the day, allaying people’s fears and answering questions.
He does yeoman service to this country. Do we appreciate the significance of that service?
I had the honor of rounding with Dr. Fauci many years …
Read more…
Dr. Fauci is being used as a political pawn. It’s time for that to stop.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced several measures guiding the care of patients during the current COVID-19 pandemic. Another important action that will immensely help the health care workers at the forefront is to reduce the documentation requirements for all patients. Health care workers should be unshackled from endless documentation, freeing up their time and resources to take care of the increasing number of …
Read more…
Relax documentation requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic
