Showing posts with label Physicians Foundation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Physicians Foundation. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

CALIFORNIA: March of the Medical Interlopers Threatening Patient Care


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.

Monday, October 1, 2012

Opinion: Why ObamaCare Has Doctors Depressed And Discouraged


Wednesday night the first presidential debate will take place in Denver. The focus will be on domestic policy. But it’s a safe bet, while you’ll likely hear about ObamaCare, you won’t hear about the doctors on the front lines of medicine in the United States today. President Obama has said he likes the term ObamaCare because it signifies that "Obama cares," but if he does, why has he failed to consider life here in the medical trenches, where me and my fellow physicians are discouraged and concerned about how we will care for you and your family in this brave new world of health insurance expansion.

You may remember the famous ad that took aim at Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan (now the GOP’s vice presidential nominee) and his proposed privatizing of Medicare -- that showed the congressman pushing an elderly woman off a cliff. The hard truth is that it is we doctors who are going off the cliff, not granny.

President Obama and Congress should have checked with the country’s physicians before passing a law that relies on our efforts to handle health insurance expansion to more than 30 million more people.

A new on-line survey by the non-profit The Physicians Foundation, one of the largest doctors surveys ever performed, confirms that over two thirds of physicians are pessimistic about the future of medicine, over 84 percent feel that our profession is in decline, and a majority would not recommend it as a career for their children. (The survey was sent to over 600,000 doctors and over 14,000 responded).

If you ask my three children you will find that neither my wife or I (also a physician) are recommending a medical career to them despite the fact that we still manage to find ways to enjoy what we do.

We are overburdened, underpaid, ill equipped to handle what we already have on our plates let alone the expected expansion under ObamaCare.
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Survey after survey from Deloitte, Sermo.com, the Doctor-Patient Medical Association, and Investors Business Daily have all previously shown that doctors are not happy with the direction of medicine and that it is impacting how we practice. 
Over the past two years I’ve taken my own informal survey as have my patients and patients all across the country. 

Doctors everywhere are complaining. We are overburdened, underpaid, ill equipped to handle what we already have on our plates let alone the expected expansion under ObamaCare. Technology provides us with more complex tests and treatments that we are paid less for administering to an increasing volume of patients.




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