Betty Rabinowitz is chief medical officer, NextGen Healthcare. She can be reached on Twitter @DrBettyR.
Dr. Rabinowitz is a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Rochester’s School of Medicine and Dentistry. She graduated from the Medical School for International Health at Ben Gurion University in Israel, where she also completed a residency in internal medicine. She came to the United States in 1990 for a fellowship in medicine and psychiatry at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, where she became a professor of clinical medicine.
In addition, Dr. Rabinowitz served as the medical director of the University of Rochester’s Center for Primary Care, overseeing clinical operations and population health management for the university’s large employed primary care network
Dr. Rabinowitz is the founder and former CEO of EagleDream Health a population health analytics platform acquired by NextGen Healthcare in 2017. She is the author of "Population Health Management Information Technology—The View from the Trenches."
This article is sponsored by NextGen Healthcare and the #NextGenMind campaign, empowering you to improve your overall health by seeking guidance and mental health support when you or a loved one needs it.
So much emphasis has been placed in recent years on the concept of …
The whole person care model is seeing its day in the sun
A 2020 President’s Message by Dr. Douglas DeLong struck a reassuring, optimistic note regarding the future of general internal medicine, a primary care specialty that has struggled in the last decade with decreasing numbers of residents choosing to join its ranks. Data shows that since 2011, the percentage of U.S.-trained physicians who have matched into primary care positions has been on the decline.
Many factors …
The future of general internal medicine is bright
June is Men’s Health Month, and this year, as we emerge from the COVID-19 epidemic, more than ever, there is a compelling need to focus on male patients’ overall health, emphasizing their mental health as a key to their wellbeing.
Mental health is a significant problem among men
There are approximately 151 million males in the U.S.; six million of them are affected by depression each year, with over …
Men’s mental health: We treat just the tip of the iceberg
Recently, a Harris Poll conducted an online among 2,055 adults ages 18+. The survey was conducted within the United States between March 25 to 29, 2021. The survey focused on individuals who had interacted with the health care system in the last year. The aim of the Connected Healthcare Study was to understand the impact COVID-19 has had on health care and communication with providers and gain insights into experiences …
How do patients really feel about virtual care and electronic patient engagement?
Providing primary care to patients with mental illness is a challenging task that requires highly skilled and experienced practitioners comfortable with the full array of biopsychosocial problems with which these patients present. For example, understanding the side-effect profiles of psychiatric medications and their impact on problems such as diabetes and other complex endocrinopathies requires highly evolved clinical skills.
Optimally, the successful care of these patients is best provided in close collaboration …
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On February 18, Dr. Marty Makary published an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal which struck an unusually optimistic note as to the stage of the American COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Makary predicts that based on the current trajectory, COVID-19 will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to return to a post-COVID-19 normal life. He notes that in the last few weeks, we have seen …
A perspective on herd immunity for COVID-19
There is ample evidence that patients with severe mental illness are at high risk for significant medical comorbidities. A complex combination of factors contributes to this excess risk and consequential poor outcomes. Socioeconomic factors, side effects from psychiatric medications, poor access to health care as well as smoking, alcohol, and substance use, prevalent in this population, are some of the factors that contribute to patients with …
The promise and challenge of integrating primary care into community-based mental health centers
Developing the COVID-19 vaccine was the first monumental milestone on a long and arduous journey to achieving the entire U.S. population’s vaccination.
One of the barriers to achieving this task is the absence of a reliable, scalable way to uniquely identify each individual before or after they receive the vaccine. Furthermore, in the absence of this unique identifier, it is extremely difficult to reliably use existing state or regional data repositories …
A national patient identifier would make vaccinating the entire U.S. population easier
In his seminal 1977 Science magazine article, “The Need for a New Medical Model: A Challenge for Biomedicine,” Dr. George Engel outlined the biomedical model’s limitations and proposed a new model, which he termed the biopsychosocial model. The biopsychosocial approach systematically considers biological, psychological, and social factors and their complex interactions in understanding health, illness, and healthcare delivery. In many ways, this approach sounds so intuitive …
Health care is making progress on the “social” in the biopsychosocial model
The mammoth task of vaccinating most of the world’s human population against COVID-19 is before us. Several viable, highly effective vaccines have been developed at record speed. The pharmaceutical industry will now be called upon to meet the next challenge of producing the vaccine at scale by manufacturing the billions of required doses. A distribution and logistics challenge follows: how to equitably coordinate and execute the widespread distribution and administration …
Vaccinating the entire U.S population: Health information technologies are positioned to help
The results of a 2019 research article in the journal Science uncovered significant racial bias in commonly used population health algorithms used to identify and assign care to patients with complex, active health needs. Using a large clinical data set, the researchers showed that Black patients are considerably sicker than white patients at any given risk score. They demonstrated that remedying this disparity would more than …
The unintended consequences of population health algorithms
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