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KevinMD Suggests Insurance Companies Pay Primary Care Physicians More

I’ve often given doctors too little credit when it comes to business decisions.

But, in an op-ed published at Reuters, physician Ford Vox argues otherwise.

He notes that doctors, indeed, have tremendous business sense:

How can anybody say that doctors don’t have business sense, when not only do most American physicians forge their way in small private practices, but new doctors lay their cards on the table every year? The competitiveness of residencies, where doctors train to become a pediatrician or a cardiologist, correlates strongly with the field’s earnings potential. Read more »

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

Quality-Based Medicare Payments: Will They Kill Private Practice?

It’s the holy grail of physician payment reform: ending fee-for-service payments to doctors and, instead, pay doctors based on the quality of care they perform. Remarkably, Congress feels they’ve found the answer:

Thus, the new language in the Senate Finance bill would finally connect Medicare reimbursements to quality, as opposed to volume.

The measure gives the secretary of Health and Human Services, working with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the power to develop quality measurements and a payment structure that would be based on quality of care relative to the cost of care. The secretary would have to account for variables that include geographic variations, demographic characteristics of a region, and the baseline health status of a given provider’s Medicare beneficiaries.

The secretary would also be required to account for special conditions of providers in rural and underserved communities.

Additionally, the quality assessments would be done on a group-practice level, as opposed to a statewide level. Thus, the amendment would reward physicians who deliver quality health care even if they are in a relatively low quality region.

The secretary of Health and Human Services would begin to implement the new payment structure in 2015. By 2017, all physician payments would need to be based on quality.

Wow. That sounds great! But there’s just one problem…

… how do we define “quality?”
Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Wes*

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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