One of my biggest problems of the RVU system is that it decided by a secret society composed of specialists. Nobody seems to have a problem that a “secret society” decides how much work and how much cost should be allocated to a medical service.
Medical procedures are very dangerous and have a lot of risk, but so is trying to provide healthcare to a complicated 2-year old that can’t tell ...
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Besides discipline, what would you say is the one thing that all athletes have in common? All Olympic athletes have a coach.
I find this interesting.
Here we have the most elite athletes in the world. Most of them have trained for most of their lives, others are repeat Olympians, and others are repeat medal winners. Yet they still have coaches.
Why would they need coaches? Surely they know what needs to be done ...
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Does your medical practice allow anybody to post links and comments on your Facebook page?
The short answer is yes. We do. Why? Because we think allowing patient to post links and commenting on our practice’s Facebook page helps us achieve these four things:
1. It encourages communication.
2. It allows us to address issues that we would otherwise have a hard time addressing.
3. Other patients will benefit by reading the discussions.
4. We ...
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Health insurance is very complicated. At our practice, we deal with health insurance all the time and even for us, it gets to be very complicated sometimes. So it is natural that patients have a hard time understanding it as well.
Therefore, I decided to summarize a conversation I had with a patient in an effort to help other patients understand, at the very least, a portion of how medical health ...
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The airlines, in an effort to recoup revenue, started charging passengers to check luggage a while back. Seems like a great strategy. Not only are they recuperating revenue, they are giving passengers a reason not to bring luggage they don’t need. This of course saves money on fuel.
The result? More bags in the main cabin.
Since there is an incentive not to check a bag, more people bring their bags as ...
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"Twitter? I don’t have time for that, besides, my life is boring; nobody wants to hear about my boring life." This is a common response when I talk to people about social media.
One of the reasons I think many have a hard time persuading docs to adopt social media, is because docs don’t understand what they can do with social media or how they can use it for ...
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This past summer, I had a few parents complain to me about our staff. The parents wanted to let me know that they were treated nicely by the staff, but they had noticed things from the employees that they didn’t appreciate. They mentioned that the staff seemed annoyed and irritated, even bored at times and a bit disingenuous.
I wanted to investigate the issue before I reprimanded the staff. Things ...
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A reader recently wrote to me: "Brandon, in our area, we’ve seen a few retail clinics pop up. What can we do as a practice to let patients know that visiting retail clinics is not in their best interest?"
We had along discussion. So I put together a summary of our conversation. Below is a rundown, more of less, of what I ...
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This past summer I got a chance to visit Washington DC. While I was there, I saw a Norman Rockwell exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. As it turned out, the exhibition was the private collection of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. The exhibition highlighted Rockwell’s masterful storytelling.
I didn’t know much about Norman Rockwell before that day. I knew he was a famous American painter and I had seen ...
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No shows. It seems that no matter what we do, we always have them.
Despite the fact that we call every single person on the schedule to remind them of their appointment the day before (the staff personally makes the call. We don’t use an automated system) we found that in 2009, we had 389 no-shows.
Slicing the data
Is 389 a high number of no-shows? I guess it depends on the size ...
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"A comprehensive and extremely useful roadmap for doctors."
-Eric Topol, MD, author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine
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Past 6 Months
Dear lawmakers: This is what it’s like to be a doctor today
Matthew Moeller, MD | PhysicianA gun owner responds to Sandy Hook
Edwin Leap, MD | PhysicianIs Chris Christie too obese to run for president?
Jeffrey Parks, MD | PhysicianIf I’m wrong about guns, can you please explain why?
Claire McCarthy, MD | PhysicianPrimary care doctors may no longer be needed
Doug Olson, MD | PhysicianWalgreens moves into primary care, and it’s our own damn fault
Kevin Pho, MD | Kevin's Take