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The Friday Funny: Enhanced Safety Standards?

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safety

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Blogging resumes tomorrow morning. 🙂

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MRI Scanner Made Of Lego

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The picture of the day award goes to the Voxel123 Flickr user who posted images of a Lego MRI scan.

lego

And the original one:

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*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

Voice Transcription Adventures With A Southern Accent

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The patient has fluferculosis, buperculosis, conbumption, arg!

The patient has fluferculosis, buperculosis, conbumption, arg!

I’ve dictated charts since I started private practice 16 years ago.  Although I like to think that I’m pretty good with the English language, it turns out that when I speak it, I mumble, slur and frequently dictate things that make no sense to the transcriptionist.

A standard chart for me might look like this:

‘This 44-year-old_____ complains of several days of ______ severe in the_______right______explosive and sudden in quanset.  (Unable to understand physician)….and stated that she(he) {please clarify} would not be short of ______ usually has no pain in _____ when she (he) falls onto the crown?’

Now, this is difficult enough, as you might expect.  And  often worse when I’m finishing a night shift, and the chart says ‘the patient is awake, alert and sleeping quietly at discharge,zzzzz.’

But voice transcription takes it to a new level.   Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at edwinleap.com*

When Is It Safe For A Patient To Leave The Hospital?

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When I initiate  final hospital discharge planning, I am making a clinical judgment that the patient is safe to leave the monitored confines of the hospital system. Hospital discharge planning begins on the day of admission.

Good hospitalists are always thinking in their minds how to get the patient safely discharged in the quickest, safest and most efficient way possible.

Sometimes the patient wishes to leave against the medical advice of the physician.  Sometimes they refuse to leave at the advice of the physician.  And sometimes the physician and patient agree it’s time for the next level of care. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at The Happy Hospitalist*

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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