October 2010

All Stories

Why drug companies lavish doctors and how they price their drugs

by | in Meds | 16 responses

An excerpt from Unhinged: The trouble with psychiatry- a doctor’s revelations about a profession in crisis. Copyright © 2010 Daniel Carlat. Excerpted with permission by Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.My own education in pharmaceutical marketing began during my second year of residency at Massachusetts General Hospital.Suddenly, I noticed that Paxil bagels began appearing everywhere. I first saw them in the break room of the ...

Why doctors need an EHR, and why they should buy it now

by | in Tech | 23 responses

The regulators have completed their work. CMS has defined how you should use technology in your practice or hospital (Meaningful Use) and technical requirements for EHRs have been finalized.Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) have removed all ambiguity regarding Government financial assistance to those purchasing EHRs, and ONC certified EHRs will start appearing shortly.A national network of federally funded ...

Can accountable care organizations lower costs and improve quality?

by | in Policy | one response

Somewhere in the Obama Administration, there is an elitist central cabal that operates with the support of the highest organs of our central government. It conspires in windowless basement rooms to plot the gun control, mass vaccinations and the nationalization of key U.S. economic sectors like automobile and chardonnay manufacturing.Healthcare, however, is its maximum target. Much like pieces on a chess board, and with the support of renegade organizations like ...

Children who are difficult may not be simply toxic

by | in Conditions | 7 responses

As a pediatrician I have listened to many parents speak of their child in very negative terms. Dr. Richard Friedman, in his New York Times article entitled Accepting That Good Parents May Plant Bad Seeds shares his patient's description of her "rude and defiant" teenage son. Like the parents in his piece, the parents of my patients have other children with whom they have had no such difficulty. ...

Nurses are the greatest ally of medical students

in Education | 12 responses

by Shawn VuongBesides the fact that I am going to marry one, I want to say that nurses are the greatest ally to the medical student."Nurses can make or break you."  I don't remember where I read this quote, so I do not know who to give the credit to, but the quote is true.  Nurses talk about doctors and medical students all of the time.  They ...

The benefit of a drug cannot be measured by the law of averages

by | in Meds | 14 responses

One of the topics that I have often thought about (especially in light of our seeming inability to develop zero-risk obesity drugs) is the problem of averages. Our entire medical philosophy of “evidence-based” medicine seems built on the “Gaussian” assumption that averages can reflect the true benefit (or risk) of a drug, when in real life (or medical practice) there is no such thing as the truly average patient.Clearly, a ...

Using Twitter and mobile apps to make healthy lifestyle changes

by | in Patient | 2 responses

There’s a lot of evidence that to prevent many serious health conditions, including diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and stroke, making healthy lifestyle changes are just as good, if not better than, taking medications. Lifestyle changes may consist of stopping unhealthy behaviors such as tobacco and excessive alcohol use, or starting healthy behaviors such as moderate daily exercise and eating adequate amounts of fresh fruits and vegetables.As anyone who has ever ...

How much staff should a doctor have?

by | in Physician | 2 responses

"How many staffers should we have per doctor?" That's a question I'm asked at almost every seminar I present. Of course, like many good consultants, I almost invariably respond "it depends."One of the factors that needs to be considered is what jobs we're talking about -- clinical or front office. It's staffing in the clinical area that will do most to enhance a physician's productivity, so that's what we'll focus ...

Coping with the culture clash between nurses and IT

in Tech | 13 responses

by John RossheimIT professionals are great at coming up with nifty tools for bringing clinical data to clinicians – as long as nurses are willing to memorize lots of byzantine paths to that information.Nurses are dedicated to providing direct care for their patients and advocating for them in every way – as long as it doesn’t mean having to adapt to ever-changing computer systems.These two stereotypes ...

Weekend video preview, October 1, 2010

in Potpourri | one response

Answering a viewer question on tardy test result reporting, and a video preview of what's coming up this weekend on KevinMD.com.  I invite you to leave general medical and social questions in the comments for me to answer in future video previews.id="viddler_ca968274" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="430" height="370" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0">

Page 8 of 812345678

Kevin Pho, MD

See all in: Pho

Physician

See all in: Physician

Patient

See all in: Patient

Policy

See all in: Policy

Tech

See all in: Tech

Social Media

See all in: Social media