Could Pay-For-Performance Lead To Overuse Of Antibiotics?
Not long ago, the Joint Commission (a healthcare quality organization) established that patients with pneumonia should receive antibiotics within four hours of diagnosis. Timely diagnosis and treatment...
View ArticleHave Reimbursement Rules Taken the Joy Out of Being A Physician?
She came to the urgent care center with a sprained ankle. The primary care provider gave her excellent care, expertly applying evidence-based evaluation guidelines to her situation, and, thereby,...
View ArticleAre Device Manufacturers Playing Bait-And-Switch with the FDA?
The problem with the FDA is that if often requires so much proof of safety and effectiveness that the time it takes to bring a new product to market can grow by 3, 4, or even more years. FDA delays …...
View ArticleYour Physician Can’t See You Yet – She’s Busy Filling Out Paperwork!
Left to our own devices, most of us physicians try our best to provide high quality care to our patients. But almost none of us provide perfect care to all of our patients all of the time. In fact,...
View ArticleWhy The Government Tried To Fix Primary Care And Failed
Americans spend more per-capita on medical care than just about any other country and, yet, they often have little to show for it. Americans have worse access to care than people in other countries,...
View ArticleHugs, Tweets, and Physician Reimbursement — A Problem for Pay-For-Performance
According to recent research, a hug a day could keep the doctor away. According to another study, twitter can predict the chance that people will experience heart attacks. A normal blogger would look...
View ArticleWatch Out Hospitals: Medicare’s Planning to Punish You if You Misbehave
It used to be that hospitals billed Medicare for the services they provided, and Medicare – I know this is crazy! – simply paid the bills. Those days are rapidly receding into history. Soon, a...
View ArticleThe Key to Surviving Your Hospital Stay? Get Admitted During Inspection Season
A fascinating study from JAMA Internal Medicine shows that hospital mortality rates decline when hospitals are being inspected by The Joint Commission, a national accrediting agency. Here’s a picture...
View ArticleIf We Cut Surgical Pay, Will Surgeons Cut into More People?
Shutterstock Knee replacements are booming. Between 2005 and 2015, the number of knee replacement procedures in the U.S. doubled, to more than one million. Experts think the figure might rise 6-fold...
View ArticleThe Good and, Too Often, the Bad of Primary Care in the U.S.
Shutterstock Death by a thousand bureaucratic demands. That’s how many American physicians currently describe their jobs, with work days that often don’t end until long after their kids go to sleep,...
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