A front-page Boston Globe article on a neurosurgeon suing a caregiver for a harsh blog post is exciting but unrepresentative of the overall state of online doctor reviews. However it caused me to take another look at online physician ratings from the perspective of someone trying to find a doctor.
Conclusion: we are still in the early days and there is plenty of opportunity for better, more useful information. ...
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For years we’ve read that the US faces a looming shortage of nurses. Shortfalls in the hundreds of thousands of nurses are routinely predicted. These predictions have been good for nursing schools, which have used the promise of ample employment opportunities to more than double the number of nursing students over the last 10 years, according to CNN.
Yet somehow 43 percent of newly-licensed RNs can’t find jobs within 18 months. ...
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I recently had some physical therapy for a minor injury. Since the office forgot to charge my co-pay the first time I went in I received a so-called Explanation of Benefits (EOB) from my insurance carrier, BlueCross BlueShield of Massachusetts. EOBs are a holdover from the mainframe era: arcane, inflexible reports that are hard to interpret. They may have done their job in the day when their only purpose was ...
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Medical malpractice reform is one of the few health care policy issues where there is a real possibility of agreement between the White House and Congress. A common refrain is that the fear of lawsuits leads physicians to practice defensive medicine, ordering too many tests just to cover their behinds in case of a lawsuit. It drives up costs without creating benefits. There’s some truth to this argument, ...
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In Today’s Hospitalist, Jeremy Graham, DO discusses implications of research he’s published about hospitalists and costs: How much is that bed on the ward? Hospitalists are clueless about patient charges. Not surprisingly, hospitalists, like almost everyone in the hospital, have no idea what anything costs. That’s no real shock, as Graham points out:
It’s often hard for hospitalists to know these charges, ...
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I was puzzled by a Health Affairs article showing the public finds arguments against treatment guidelines a lot more compelling than arguments in favor. But after reading the technical appendix, which contains the full text of the survey, I think the problem is that the researchers framed the question poorly. In particular, the researchers portrayed guidelines as unrealistically rigid.
In A National Survey Reveals Public Skepticism About Research-Based Treatment ...
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Rationing is a very dirty word in America, evoking grim images of wartime Great Britain and, in the health care context, withholding of needed care from patients based on cost. But cut back on costs we must, and with magical thinking about the deficit becoming every more popular, we’ll have to find other ways to convince folks to do it.
Patient safety is a promising guise under which to achieve cutbacks, ...
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Oncology is the area where the health care cost conundrum is coming into sharpest focus. Theoretically, who wouldn’t spend whatever it takes to cure a life-threatening disease? And yet practically the costs of new treatments are so high, and the improvements usually modest enough, that when it comes right down to it costs are becoming a real issue for patients and doctors.
An interesting article in the Journal of Clinical Oncology ...
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Mark Perry provides an interesting inference from two news stories: a WSJ article that suggests consumers are using less health care and another that reports a big jump in MinuteClinic volumes.
Consumers aren’t necessarily consuming less health care like the WSJ suggests; rather, they are shifting their demand for health care away from expensive, conventional physician offices with limited hours to affordable and convenient retail ...
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One of the big complaints about the recently enacted health care reform law is that it does little to control costs. There is some truth to that because the major focus is on increasing access to insurance. And yet there is reason for optimism on a couple of fronts:
"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