Interlopers are government personnel who impose regulations that take me away from my work in order to check boxes, collect meaningless data, or fill out forms that address “nothing” about “something.” Interlopers are vendors, insurers or bureaucrats who have something to gain in dollars and power at the expense of the health of America’s patients.
I am a physician and my job was to manage the health and medical care of my patients. That was the basis of my very extensive training and the focus of my life until the invasion of the interlopers. The schizoid attempt by the interlopers to confound me and other physician professionals is driving the health industry into an expensive civil war.
According to the Physicians Foundation there are already 2,167 quality metrics demanding a physicians’ time and attention. The individual private practice is overwhelmed by the increasingly irrelevant paper work while larger groups find it easier to purchase staff to assist.
Further, productivity has decreased by an estimated 30 percent with the implementation of the electronic medical record. The utility of the EMR should be the opportunity to provide patient data at the point of service. That has not been accomplished because the 2 major EMR vendors (Epic and Cerner) don’t integrate with each other or doctors’ offices. Every EMR is a silo of data: data collected so that doctors or hospitals might collect a bonus from the payer (government or insurer). This data is administrative, not clinical, data nor is it an accurate representation of a physician’s work. It is, however, readily available to hackers.
Ms. Faulkner, the multibillionaire CEO of Epic also sits on the government panel that recommends IT standards. Typical of an interloper, Epic has found a way to create a need for itself while supervising his or her own work.
ICD is an administrative coding system attempting to translate a patient’s clinical condition into a code. ICD 10 is the 10th iteration of this code set and increases the codes available to 87,000 from the 14,000 codes in the ICD 9 code set. While this is the coding set used by the World Health Association as a means of documenting diagnosis, in the U.S., these codes are used as a means of validating payment. In either case, the data is useless as a means of legitimately documenting a patient visit or ongoing care. Our patients’ medical history doesn’t fit into a box created by a bureaucrat.
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