More Bureaucracy: Quality Healthcare Measured With Check Boxes
With the news that Wellpoint, one of the largest insurance companies in America, will cut off annual 8% payment increases to about 1,500 hospitals if they fail to “test” high enough on 51 quality measures, they have officially defined “quality” health care as checkboxes.
Yep, checkboxes.
You see how do insurers know if we offer each of our patient’s nutritional guidance or exercise counseling?
Well, they check to see of doctors have clicked on a yellow warning box advising we do this. If we have, then not only is that doctor a fine, “quality” doctor, but the hospitals (and it’s computer system and scores of administrative staff that compile and submit this data) are real, fine, “quality” hospitals.
That’s all there is to it.
Never mind if we don’t have time to actually perform the counseling.
* click * * check * * click *
Simple as pie. Efficient, too.
Beautiful bureaucratic quality.
Good luck with that.
*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Wes*
somebody call the whambulance for Dr Wes. he’s got problems, but no solutions or alternatives to offer – not even the simple-to-the-point-of-idiocy refrain, ‘pay me more and then I’ll do what should be done’, that is so popular with so many of his peers – yet he wants our sympathy.
Poor Dr Wes. Poor, poor Dr. Wes.
Health care will be different than what you want it to be. It may not be better, but it will be different than you want it to be, if this is all you can muster by way of response to where things are going, with you or without you.
Missin’ you, Dr. Wes