Physician emails to patients cut down costs at the expense of physician incomes. Matthew Holt calls this part of the bizarro world of fee-for-service care:
This is of course great news. Productivity goes up, patients are happier and their care is probably better. Of course in the bizzaro world of health care that we live in, this would translate into a 7″“10% decline in primary care physicians’ incomes.
Related posts:
- Males = specialists, females = primary care physicians
- HIPAA forbidding patient/physician e-mails?
- Physician salaries
- E-mails and telephone calls to the doctor cut down on patient office visits
- Before you think about cutting physician salaries
- Physician salaries are not keeping up with inflation
- Physician e-mails break the law
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{ 4 comments }
same with electronic records – gain in efficiency for increase in practice costs, with little or no hope to recoup. that is the real reason EMRs are slow to take off.
If they would just allow us to charge the patient equally for such a service, then problem solved!
Are there any standards for charging for email communicae? No?
How about out lawyer friends? How do they charge for email? (do they charge for the time spent: reading the email TO them, thinking what to write, actually writing, revising what was written?)
why can’t we do the same?
Strangely enough, there’s actually a billing code for email…the issue is that collection is such a pain in the *!@#, that its more expensive to collect than to simply eat the cost. Why this has to go through insurance, I’m not quite sure, as you would expect dollar amounts to be reasonable (how expensive can an email be…especially when it often replaces other forms of communication).
Interesting article on email from the ACP at http://www.acponline.org/journals/news/jan-feb07/online.htm
I also have a broader discussion on the whole issues with insurance as the distribution mechanism for retail health care on my blog here:
http://consumerfocusedcare.blogspot.com/2007/07/mandatory-health-insurance-tax-on.html
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