Washington, DC, physician Katherine Chretian gives her take on the issue in a recent USA Today op-ed. She is an expert of the Facebook-medicine intersection, having authored a JAMA study on the issue.
She says, no, doctors should not be friending their patients:
Having a so-called dual relationship with a patient — that is, a financial, social or professional relationship in addition to the therapeutic relationship — can lead to serious ethical issues and potentially impair professional judgment. We need professional boundaries to do our job well.
Furthermore, there’s the little matter of patient privacy and HIPAA. I wasn’t aware of this, but simply becoming Facebook friends with patients can infringe upon uncertain ground. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at KevinMD.com*
Apparently the New England Journal of Medicine was listening yesterday when I suggested to an audience in Chicago that the way to a doctor’s heart is through his smartphone. The NEJM This Week iPhone App went live this morning on iTunes and it’s worth a look.
The App offers four pages covering articles, images, audio and video. According to Toby Plewak, NEJM’s Manager of Product Development, the article page covers most everything available through the print/web version as well as all of the “online first” (early release) articles for the current week. The only articles excluded are those that can’t be delivered effectively on the iPhone.
I just listened to the NEJMThis Week audio summary and it’s beautiful (I know what I’ll be doing during my drives to the Texas Medical Center.) Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at 33 Charts*
The Associated Press has been running a fantastic series of must reads with the latest article highlighting the consequence of too many imaging studies, like X-rays and CT scans, which are the biggest contributor to an individual’s total radiation exposure in a lifetime. Americans get more imaging radiation exposure and testing than people from other industrialized countries.
Reasons for doing too many tests include malpractice fear, patient demands for imaging, the difficulty in obtaining imaging results from other doctors or hospitals, as well as advanced technologies, like coronary angioplasty, which have increased radiation but avoid a far more invasive surgery like heart bypass. Read more »
Medical malpractice is a major issue that divides doctors and lawyers — with patients often left in the middle. I wrote last year in USA Today that reform is sorely needed, mainly to help injured patients be compensated more quickly and fairly than they currently are:
Researchers from the New England Journal of Medicine found that nearly one in six cases involving patients injured from medical errors received no payment. For patients who did receive compensation, they waited an average of five years before their case was decided, with one-third of claims requiring six years or more to resolve. These are long waits for patients and their families, who are forced to endure the uncertainty of whether they will be compensated or not.
And with 54 cents of every dollar injured patients receive used to pay legal and administrative fees, the overhead costs clearly do not justify this level of inefficiency.
In this video excerpt from The Vanishing Oath, a film directed by Ryan Flesher, M.D., perspectives from both sides are given, and it’s easy to see why this contentious issue isn’t going to be resolved anytime soon:
*This blog post was originally published at KevinMD.com*
Much has been recently made about the bureaucratic obstacles that primary care doctors face. With good reason. The impetus was a recent New England Journal of Medicine paper from Richard J. Baron that I mentioned recently.
The New York Times’ Pauline Chen interviewed Dr. Baron, who shared some interesting insights on what needs to be done. He contrasts the inertia in primary care to drug manufacturing.
If you took the resources that went into drug development, for instance, “and put them into a program like this that achieves meaningful levels of behavior change, a lot more patients could be better off.” In other words, research into new primary care models isn’t taking off because the money isn’t there.
But Dr. Baron also notes that money isn’t everything, since “primary care practitioners have been saying that we either already do or would do certain things if you paid us more. It’s true that you can’t do things consistently, reliably and across scales without additional payment. But payment is not enough. People have to change what they are thinking about when they go to work.” Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at KevinMD.com*
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