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How to redesign night shift in health care

Conditions and Diseases

May 12, 2026

Hospitals operate around the clock.

Emergencies do not pause at midnight. Sepsis progresses overnight. Stroke symptoms emerge at 3 a.m. Trauma arrives unannounced. Respiratory failure does not respect business hours. While much of the world sleeps, health care professionals continue making high-stakes decisions in ICUs, emergency departments, labor floors, hospital wards, and operating rooms across the country.

Yet there remains a conversation health care systems are still largely avoiding: What is the …

Clinician grief is a hidden crisis in modern hospice care

Linda Ellington, RN

Conditions and Diseases

May 12, 2026

I stood knocking at the door of my hospice patient like I did every Monday for the past eight months. A musically talented man in his early 40s was always waiting for my weekly nursing visit, more so for the aspect of socialization. He was diagnosed with colon cancer two years prior and had a colostomy bag, leaving this once vibrant, social, even handsome man a shell of what he …

Physician vs. provider is an ethics issue, not just style

American College of Physicians

Physician

May 12, 2026

A position paper about using the term physician instead of provider? What does this have to do with biomedical ethics?

I fully support calling ourselves physicians and not providers, and have been sensitive to this issue in part thanks to Read more…

Physician vs. provider is an ethics issue, not just style

HIV care requires better patient education today

Yeralis Rodriguez Velazquez, RN

Conditions and Diseases

May 12, 2026

There was a moment when human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was at the center of public conversation. Campaigns were everywhere. Education was constant. Awareness was urgent. Today, that urgency feels quieter. In many ways, this shift reflects progress. Advances in treatment have transformed HIV into a manageable chronic condition. Stigma, while still present, is not as visible as it once was. Patients are living longer, fuller lives. From the outside, it …

Bolus or drip? What the DOSE trial actually showed about heart failure [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

May 11, 2026

Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes!

What if one of the most common escalation strategies for acute heart failure doesn’t actually improve outcomes? Internal medicine physicians Benjamin P. Geisler, Jeffrey L. Greenwald, and Kathy May Tran, editors of 50 …

Accounts receivable days hide four billing problems

GetPracticeHelp

Physician Finance

May 11, 2026

A cash symptom can have several causes

A practice owner notices the same warning signs: collections are lower than expected, the bank balance feels tighter, and the billing report shows money still sitting unpaid. The first conclusion is usually simple. Billing is the problem.

Sometimes that is true. More often, the word “billing” is covering several different problems that require different fixes. A slow front desk, a coding issue, payer delays, denial …

AI therapy chatbots are crossing into impersonation

Muhamad Aly Rifai, MD

Health Technology

May 11, 2026

For a moment, I wondered whether I had a crystal ball.

I had written several times on KevinMD about artificial intelligence in medicine. I had written for Forbes Business Council about AI as a developing cognitive tool, synthetic reality, executive distortion, and the danger of treating fluent output as reliable judgment. I kept returning to one warning. AI was one step away from a serious blunder, and that blunder …

The handwashing standard nobody finished. Until now.

Bernadette Burroughs, RN

Conditions and Diseases

May 11, 2026

We have all seen the sign. Hanging on the wall of every restaurant, every hospital break room, every public restroom in America: Employees Must Wash Hands Before Returning to Work. And yes, washing your hands after using the bathroom is essential. The science is clear. The data backs it up. It saves lives. But after more than 30 years as a registered nurse, from the ICU and emergency room to …

Expanding the SOAP framework boosts health outcomes

Deepak Gupta, MD and Sarwan Kumar, MD

Physician

May 11, 2026

The Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan (SOAP) framework could be expanded beyond clinical care to also address patients’ financial and legal well-being. This would require training health care providers in basic financial and legal principles, establishing dedicated financial-legal departments within health care institutions, and potentially offering financial and legal services as add-ons to health care insurance. With these changes, routine health care encounters could become more comprehensive, addressing socioeconomic needs …

How to navigate physician job loss in the first week

Patrick Hudson, MD

Physician

May 11, 2026

A generation ago, most physicians barely considered the possibility of suddenly losing a job.

The profession was not perfectly stable, of course. Doctors still burned out, practices failed, partnerships fractured, and hospitals behaved badly from time to time. But for many physicians there remained an underlying assumption that competence and hard work created a reasonably durable professional life. If you trained well, treated patients properly, maintained your reputation, and kept your …

Physician burnout is a heavy burden for many healers

Moses Kim, MD

Physician

May 11, 2026

I am a former vascular surgeon, and I left the field in 2020 at the height of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) due to burnout. And though I had not been well for some years, I was able to find myself again and rediscover my passion for music. In the end, my health and my family became my priority, so currently I work in a more stable outpatient clinical setting.

I started …

Unavoidable pressure ulcer claims live and die by the record

Tracy Liberatore, Esq, PA

Conditions and Diseases

May 11, 2026

Scenario: A resident develops a stage 4 pressure ulcer after admission to a long-term care facility. Plaintiff counsel argues the facility failed to prevent it. Defense counsel argues the ulcer was clinically unavoidable. Both positions hinge on the same federal regulation. The question is what the regulation actually says, and how the medical record measures up to it.

To work through this one, it is time for a history lesson. Travel …

Harm reduction effectively treats substance use disorder

Amanda Perez, MD, Mary Finedore, and Alyssa Lambrecht, DO

Conditions and Diseases

May 11, 2026

My pager beeps as I walk through the hospital doors. It is a familiar message, “Your patient wants to leave.” We admitted John four days ago for opioid withdrawal and he is not yet ready to stop using opioids. When I walk in the room, I see him packing his bags. “So, John,” I say. “When you leave, your body cannot tolerate the same amount of opioids because you have …

Dehumanization in medicine: the language of disposition

Aditya Singh, MD

Physician

May 10, 2026

As a second-year internal medicine resident, I had an unexpected epiphany during my geriatrics rotation, not amid the chaos of a bustling hospital, but within the reflective calm of a rehabilitation facility.

As I walked into the room of a long-term care patient recovering after a stroke, there was a man in front of me who was wheelchair-bound and visibly distressed. His speech was difficult to understand, but as I listened …

Pediatric asthma care demands better proper inhaler use

Piyush Pillarisetti

Conditions and Diseases

May 10, 2026

Early in my pediatrics rotation, I learned that I should get used to admitting children for asthma exacerbations. And so, during each intake, one question quickly became routine: “Do you use a spacer and mask with your inhaler at home?” More often than not, the answer was a no, often followed by, “What is that?”

That gap in knowledge has significant clinical consequences. Proper inhaler use entails a choreograph of multiple …

Physician burnout is not a failure of resilience

Gus W. Krucke, MD

Physician

May 10, 2026

There comes a point in medicine when knowledge, effort, and goodwill are no longer enough to explain why someone keeps going.

Most people enter medical training with a purpose so obvious it barely needs words. Suffering exists. Skill can help. The work matters.

Then training tests that belief. The test rarely comes as one dramatic moment. It comes through accumulation: criticism without context, responsibility before confidence, long hours, grief carried quietly, and …

How a clinical trial changed the way I see Mother’s Day

Regina Portnoy

Conditions and Diseases

May 10, 2026

Every year, as Mother’s Day approaches, we see the same messages.
Celebrate your mom. Call her. Hug her. Don’t take her for granted.
And yet, for so many, that hug is no longer possible.
There is a quiet grief that lives inside this day.
Because as long as our parents are alive, a part of us remains a child, protected, grounded, held by something bigger than ourselves.
And when that is gone, something shifts forever.

Years …

What no one tells you about fertility, from a doctor

Oluyemisi Famuyiwa, MD

Conditions and Diseases

May 10, 2026

An excerpt from The Quest for Fertility.

Prologue: a quiet place of hope

Even in the stillness, life is quietly unfolding.

There’s a small butterfly garden tucked away in Wheaton Regional Park, a place I’ve long considered sacred. It isn’t grand or loud; it doesn’t demand attention. You step into a soft netted enclosure surrounded by blooms so vivid they almost seem unreal. Inside, monarchs and swallowtails drift lazily through the air, …

Why bipolar II is not just a milder version of bipolar I

Ethan Evans, MD

Conditions and Diseases

May 10, 2026

When I graduated from medical school, I carried an assumption I suspect many of us do: Bipolar II disorder is a “milder” version of bipolar I. After all, mania is dramatic. It is disruptive. It can involve psychosis, hospitalization, legal consequences, and financial devastation. Hypomania, by comparison, seems restrained: more energy, less sleep, no involuntary admission. The hierarchy seemed obvious. Mania is more severe than hypomania. Therefore bipolar I must …

Rebuilding patient trust when medical advice is resisted

Fabrizia Faustinella, MD, PhD

Physician

May 10, 2026

I would like to share with readers a story about a clinical encounter that challenged my ability to build trust amid fear and misunderstanding. As a practicing physician and medical educator, I have long been drawn to the emotional and ethical dimensions of patient care. While the story itself is not unique, it captures a recurring tension in our work, the gap that can emerge between clinical expertise and patient …

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