How are you feeling today? Do you feel a bit under the weather? Maybe you have some aches and pains, or a miserable flu, or maybe you have some chronic condition like diabetes or asthma, or some other ailment. Perhaps you could benefit from medical attention, but then again getting medical care is so darn inconvenient and expensive and time consuming, and everybody knows that our health care system is ...
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A dark wind is beginning to blow through the tortured landscape of health care in America. At the confluence of the corporate cold front with the warm front of technology innovation, a storm is brewing. A storm that may grow into gentle and much needed rain showers, or the grandest tornado ever experienced by mankind, and unlike the wondrous works of nature, the path taken here is completely within our ...
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IBM’s Dr. Watson of Jeopardy! fame has finally completed its residency and fellowships and, presumably to its creators’ utter delight, is now a practicing oncologist.
The prodigy “cognitive system” completed its training in less than a year at the illustrious Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and although only proficient in lung cancer right now, Dr. Watson’s career as an advisor ...
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Somewhere between the 20th century bank ATM and the 25th century Tricorder, lays the EMR that we should have today. Somewhere between the government-designed meaningful use EMR and the holographic doctor in Star Trek, there should be a long stretch of disposable trial-and-error cycles of technology, changing and morphing from good to better to magical. For this to happen, we must release the EMR from its balls and chains.
We must ...
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Better Care for Individuals, Better Health for Populations, and Lower Per Capita Costs
-ihi.org
If you stop to think about the holy grail of health care reform, also known as the Triple Aim, it sounds like a grand challenge involving wizardry or wishful thinking or worse, propaganda for the masses, particularly the last part. It’s like attempting to build a better driving machine, with better fuel efficiency at lower cost. ...
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Adam Smith would disagree, Karl Marx would be appalled, and heck even Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand would be raising objections. But for some peculiar reason, there are enough contemporary lesser economic minds scattered throughout the entire philosophical spectrum, that are advocating for, and enabling the execution of, a government induced transition of our health care system to an oligopoly model ...
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If this were a business concerned with bottom lines, cash flows and sustainability, this would be a good time to begin planning one of those posh executive retreats to evaluate current strategy. People would be feverishly working on pulling data for PowerPoint presentations, summarizing market research and deciding whether to select the vegetarian meal or not. If this were a better ...
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Every time someone publishes an article or a paper or a blog post that has anything remotely to do with electronic health records (EHR), there is usually a flurry of reactions in the comments section, now available in most publications, and these always include at least half a dozen anonymous statements, usually from clinicians, decrying the current state of EHR software, best summed up by a commenter on
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Wherever health care reformation and transformation is discussed, sooner or later the imperative of patient engagement is sure to materialize. Patients, it seems, are no longer content to be passive spectators while care is administered to them, and instead are demanding to be active participants in their own health care decisions. Gone are the paternalistic days of doctor knows best, replaced by informed and educated patients on an equal footing ...
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The health care crowd is abuzz with the New York Times revelation that Medicare billing rates seem to have increased by billions of dollars in parallel with increased adoption of EHR technologies for both hospitals and ambulatory services. The culprit for this unexpected increase is the measly E&M code.
Evaluation and Management (E&M) is the portion of a medical visit where the doctor listens to ...
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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