May 5th, 2010 by JessicaBerthold in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Opinion
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Some interesting points were raised at a recent Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM) session by Winthrop Whitcomb and Nancy Mihevc on patient satisfaction. To improve satisfaction scores:
1. Review the patient’s chart before you go in the room. It makes a big difference if the patient perceives you know what’s going on without having to bury your face in a chart.
2. Patients are often confused about who they are supposed to see after discharge. This, of course, is a safety issue as well as one that affects patient satisfaction.
3. Sit down when you are visiting a patient. Patients are happiest when they perceive you’ve spent enough time with them, and they are more likely to perceive this if you are sitting than standing with your hand on the doorknob. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Hospitalist*
April 21st, 2010 by Edwin Leap, M.D. in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Opinion
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I’m always fascinated by the complaints that the emergency department is so overused and expensive. I admit that it is used a lot, and that care can seem expensive. But I want to make it clear that the reasons are myriad.
Whenever we in the specialty say that we feel that patients abuse our services, someone in academia reminds us that only a small number of those patients do not actually have serious illnesses. Whether or not that’s true, one of the reasons we are overused is due to none other than other physicians.
I’ve been paying attention lately to the way physician referral patterns happen. I suspect it’s the same in other facilities. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at edwinleap.com*
April 14th, 2010 by Shadowfax in Better Health Network, Opinion, True Stories
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Intueri (Maria) has it. Go read. Really. I’ll wait. Go read then and come back here, because I have something to say, too. She writes beautifully, and it’s a hard read. I almost stopped before I finished it, and I did flinch more than once. The man she writes about was in my ER today, or at least someone very like him.
He was rolled onto a hallway gurney, given a cursory inspection, and left to sleep it off before being given the “bum’s rush out” when he became more sober and obnoxious. He was viewed by the staff as an irritation, a burden, an annoyance. Smelly, dirty and creepy. Scaring the children as they walked by to their rooms. Nurses were short-tempered and brusque to him, and the doctors avoided him as much as possible. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Movin' Meat*
April 14th, 2010 by Toni Brayer, M.D. in Better Health Network, Health Policy, News, Opinion, Research
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If you think the overcrowding in emergency rooms across the country is because of the uninsured, think again.
A new study in the Annals of Emergency Medicine reports that of patients who are frequent users (over 4 times a year) of emergency departments (ED), the uninsured represent only 15 percent of those frequent users.
Also, the frequent ED users were more likely than occasional users to have visited a primary care physician in the previous year.
They also found that most patients who frequently use the ED have health insurance and the majority of users (60 percent) were white. These findings contradict the widely held assumption that frequent users are minorities or illegal immigrants without insurance. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at EverythingHealth*
April 7th, 2010 by KevinMD in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Opinion, Primary Care Wednesdays
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Overuse of the emergency department is commonly discussed during the healthcare conversation, especially with the lack of primary care access shunting patients with seemingly routine symptoms to the ER. But is this a myth? That’s what two emergency physicians contend in a piece from Slate.
The emergency department is functioning just fine, they say: “Just 12 percent of ER visits are not urgent. People also tend to think ER visits cost far more than primary care, but even this is disputable. In fact, the marginal cost of treating less acute patients in the ER is lower than paying off-hours primary care doctors, as ERs are already open 24/7 to handle life-threatening emergencies.” Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at KevinMD.com*
