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Patient Tests, EHRs, And Medical Homes: The Price Isn’t Right

Healthcare reform is forcing medical students to learn about the financial costs of the tests they order, as well as their clinical importance. Once a taboo topic, it’s being openly taught to students to prepare them for practice.

At Harvard, one physician in training duplicated television’s “The Price is Right” to keep his peers guessing at the costs of tests on a patient’s bill. Molly Cooke, FACP, a Regent of the College, encourages doctors to consider the value of the tests they order as they deliver care. (Kaiser Health News, New England Journal of Medicine)

The price isn’t right for electronic medical records. Even $44,000 in stimulus money isn’t enough to make doctors jump into using computers. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*

A Not-So-Unforseen Complication of Electronic Health Records

[Here’s a] good article [from] the New York Times written by a doctor [Pauline Chen, M.D.] about intrusive aspects of electronic health records (EHRs) on doctor-patient communication. An excerpt:

“…just because EMR improves information sharing and retrieval, it doesn’t necessarily follow that our communication with patients and colleagues will also be better.”

Read the rest of the article here.

*This blog post was originally published at a few thoughts from a tumor surgeon*

Med Students Better At Finding Information On Facebook Than In EHRs

Generation Y medical students are supposed to be the tech-savvy ones. As it turns out, they may be more familiar with Facebook than with the electronic health records they’ll likely use in their medical practice. (Modern Physician, free-registration required)

Educators at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine assessed nearly 190 fourth-year medical students on their use of EHRs during a mock encounter simulating a cancer patient hospitalized with complications from chemotherapy.

Students were scored on their ability to find information crucial to the patient’s case within the EHR and their ability to analyze the EHR without alienating the patient. While most couldn’t access the information, they did interact with the patients face-to-face and even explained when they looked away to the computer.

Following more research, the school may incorporate class work on using EHRs.

*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*

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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