Fred N. Pelzman, MD

Once again, we find ourselves stuck between a rock and a hard place. Increasingly, providers are being pressured to improve access for our patients, which we certainly think is a good thing. We want our patients to come in, whether it's for their annual physicals, for ongoing routine management of their chronic health conditions, or for acute issues best handled in the ...

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To do the math right, you have to get your numerator and denominator correct, or else things just don't work. Recently, in the midst of a large patient safety and quality improvement project trying to bridge gaps in breast cancer screening among our patients, we discovered that one of the large databases of patients who were attributed to us contained innumerable ...

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Several patients seen in our practice recently were significantly and dramatically transformed by the electronic health record (EHR). And not in a good way. Take, for instance, the patient whose outside chart was reviewed when she showed up in our office for a follow-up appointment after an emergency department visit. The notes from the emergency department providers, including a scribe and the ...

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86 minutes. That's what I found when I added up how late patients were through a single practice session earlier in the week. Some patients arrived on time, and some a few minutes early, but the average was about 8 minutes late, ranging up to one patient who showed up an hour and 12 minutes after their scheduled appointment time. The reason I ...

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How do we change the way we think about taking care of patients, particularly when it comes to not the individual patient sitting in front of us, but a whole population of patients just like them (or somewhat like them)? In our practice, we have been struggling with how to best do population health, trying to find the best ways to ...

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5,177. That's the current number of "cc'ed charts" as of this morning in my electronic health record in-basket. While it might sound like a lot, this is not at all an unusual accumulation, partly due to the fact that I receive a notation every time a patient at our practice gets a flu shot, and also every time one of my patients or ...

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"Sorry Dr. Pelzman, just one exam room today." This is how our medical technician greeted me as I arrived for my Wednesday morning practice session earlier this week, with a full panel of patients on the schedule set to see me over the next few hours. Most of them were my own patients, well known to me, but a few were new patients who had been referred by colleagues in our institution, ...

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What do our patients really want from us? When a patient calls up to schedule an appointment, or sends us a message through the patient portal, or calls our front desk staff to leave a message, what is it that they're looking for? I think, more than anything else, our patients are looking to us as health care providers to be able to be there for them, to address their health needs ...

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At a quality and patient safety meeting recently, one of the departments was presenting their annual report on all they have done, reviewing progress that has been made around several quality and patient safety initiatives. One of their project centered on efforts to decrease an incredibly high no-show rate. Coupled with their desire to avoid overbooking appointments, the problem has compromised patient access, both for their own established patients and for new ...

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