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Growing Your Practice With Ancillary Services: Why It’s A Bad Idea

I’m just about through with the magazine Medical Economics. I’ve been a devoted follower ever since residency, when I used to find the occasional dollar bill stuck somewhere in one of the back pages. But now it seems that each issue is just more of the same old stuff.

Take the cover story of the current issue: “Grow Your Practice with Ancillaries,” such as labs, x-rays, behavioral health interventions, cosmetic services, and selling stuff. All the things they suggest fit neatly into one of three categories:

  1. Things you should already be doing (whether or not you’re getting paid appropriately for them)
  2. Things you shouldn’t be doing, and
  3. Things no one should be doing.

The behavioral intervention discussed most often in this context is obesity counseling something all doctors should already be doing. Unsurprisingly, Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Musings of a Dinosaur*

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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