Review: "Overcrowding Forces Tennessee VA Clinics to Stop Accepting New Patients" - NPR
This article was submitted (and well written) by Emily Siner of Nashville Public Radio http://www.npr.org/2016/04/22/474388101/overcrowding-forces-tennessee-va-clinic-to-stop-accepting-new-patients I try not to be sensational. But let's be clear: we knowingly hurt our veterans. The VA and Tricare/Champus military insurance are all products created to provide care but have morphed into huge barriers to quality, local, affordable healthcare. We might as well walk up to a ve
Review: "Medicaid May Soon Pay for Some Inpatient Addiction Treatment" – NPR
This story was written by Ben Allen for NPR yesterday. Substance abuse treatment is sometimes a difficult subject to discuss because it is strongly influenced by both biology and psychology. People often wonder why they don't "just stop." That question has implications across the board and treatment is often a mix of biological and psychological approaches that oftentimes are misunderstood by those holding the opposite philosophy. With that said, the best way to make the sit
Review: "Some Health Plans Have No In-Network Doctors in Key Specialties" – NPR
This was an article posted by Alison Kodjak of NPR. My response: yup, and we let insurance companies get away with this shit. What would happen if you bought a computer and upon getting it home, it didn't contain a power cord? You'd be pissed. Especially since there's a picture of the power cord on the box, and so you expected to have a power cord when you got home. Otherwise, you'd have went with a different brand or just bought the damn power cord while you were at the stor
Q: I'm not going to learn how to use another EHR. I'm almost retired.
This was a response, not so much a question, from an older physician I communicated with on a forum. Here's my response: hire a scribe. There's this interesting phenomenon occurring in medicine currently that I think is absolutely f*cking brilliant. Have students in higher medical education (medical/PA/NP students) sitting in the room with the doctor transcribing what the doctor does and says. Afterward, the doctor signs off on the note, and they move on to the next patient.
Q: So I looked at your plan; why should providers be on salary?
"So I looked at your plan; why should providers be on salary?" This was a question posed by an anonymous person in a forum I chat on. They had really great manners (which seems more and more rare these days). When I thought about how to support and incentivize a provider to go into the field of medicine, I looked at my own behaviors. When I was fully salaried and making above 200K, I was perfectly fine with waste. Even though I was the most productive physician in my group, I
Q: How can you create a safe, universal EHR?
"How can you create a safe, universal EHR?" This question was posted on a doctor's blog who insisted that not only should we stay on paper but that they themselves would never use a universal EHR because of privacy. That is one approach, and there are times when paper items are still very applicable (e.g. psychotherapy processing notes). But given that your very identity is held in massive server files protected by the government and other commercial interests, including heal
Review: "The Tangle of Coordinated Health Care" – The New York Times
Health care coordination deserves a big ole Southern "bless your heart." Read The New York Times article by Paula Span. It's a grand intention to create health care coordinators and service representatives to help walk people through the hurdles of our health care delivery system. But these people only serve to make a convoluted process more confusing. The rules regarding HIPAA and privacy and the increasing burden of litigious documentation means that there is a lot of hesit