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Which Patients Are Happiest With The Care They Receive?

Adults who received care from a medical home in 11 Westernized countries were less likely to report medical errors and were happier with their care, according to a new Commonwealth Fund international survey.

The 2011 survey included more than 18,000 ill adults in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It included people who reported they were in fair or poor health, had surgery or had been hospitalized in the past two years, or had received care for a serious or chronic illness, injury or disability in the past year. The vast majority had seen multiple physicians.

A medical home was defined as patients reporting a regular source of care that knows their medical history, is accessible and helps coordinate care received from other providers. Results were published in Health Affairs.

Sicker adults in the U.S. were the most likely to Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*

Should An Expired EpiPen Ever Be Used?

Though one should always use an EpiPen that is not expired, it is better to use an expired EpiPen to treat anaphylaxis than to do nothing at all.

Some Canadian researchers studied expired EpiPen auto-injectors 1 to 90 months past the expiration date.

What they found was that the older the EpiPen, Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Fauquier ENT Blog*

Dealing With This Canadian Pharmacy Is More Trouble Than It’s Worth

Looking to obtain a break on my practice’s botulinum toxin of choice (Myobloc) I yielded to curiosity and ordered from a Canadian Pharmacy…Northwest Pharmacy.com. I figured we would try to break the price point of this popular product. Thankfully I used my credit card.

Botulinum toxin must be kept cold to retain its potency. We traditionally receive this product on dry ice and have never had much of a problem with effectiveness. I was promised by the pharmacy rep that this product would arrive cold within 2-5 days of shipping. Only after I gave her my credit card information did she share with me that the product would be coming from Great Britain. This was not welcome news. I was reassured that the product would be cold and usable.

The product arrived Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Truth in Cosmetic Surgery*

Why Is There So Much Less Paperwork In Canadian Health Care?

If you ask internists and their patients what makes them bonkers about the U.S. health care system, paperwork will top the list. Many will point to the federal government as the culprit, citing the many forms, RAC audits, pre-and post-payment reviews, documentation and coding guidelines, HIPAA privacy rules, quality measurement and reporting, Part D drug formularies, and HIT meaningful use requirements imposed by Medicare and other federal programs. (Some put more of the blame on private insurers and pharmacy benefit managers.)

But if paperwork is associated with the degree of government involvement in health care, then Canada–a single payer system–should have more of it than the United States, right? Think again.

A new Health Affairs survey of U.S. physicians and practice administrators found that U.S. physicians spend Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at The ACP Advocate Blog by Bob Doherty*

Certifiable: CNP, RNCP, RHN, NNCP and Other Suspect “Accreditations”

The team of nutritionists at D’avignon Digestive Health Centre on Danforth Avenue in Toronto are an impressive bunch — just consider their qualifications:

  • Louise Comtois – CNP, RNCP, Colon Therapist
  • Heidi Horowitz – CNP, RNCP, Live Cell Analyst
  • Marnie Ryan – CNP, Colon Therapist
  • Natasha Audette – RHN, Colon Therapist
  • Jane Sloan – CNP, NNCP, RhA

CNP, RNCP, RHN, NNCP. I single out D’avignon only because they came up at the top of my Google search, but the story is consistent across the nutritionist community — there are an awful lot of letters next to the names of practitioners. So what exactly do they all mean? Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Skeptic North » Erik Davis*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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