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Too Much Testing And Treatment? Try Superb Primary Care

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 »

*This blog post was originally published at Saving Money and Surviving the Healthcare Crisis*

The “Medical Home” In Ontario: The Poor Left Behind Again

In a recent blog posting, I described Group Health’s medical home for 8,000 patients. It proved to be a boon for primary care physicians, who were able to reduce the size of their patient panels, see fewer patients per day, refer more patients to specialists, and maintain or increase their incomes.

Patients liked it, too. And Group Health was happy because expenditures per patient were 2 percent lower. But poor patients had trouble getting through the front door of the medical home, so based on demographic differences alone, expenditures should have been lower by 10 percent or more. Nonetheless, they declared victory.

Now news filters south from Ontario’s eight-year experiment with medical homes for 8,000,000 patients, and the news is similar. Participation is skewed to healthier and wealthier patients who, in the absence of risk adjustment, yield profitable capitation for primary care physicians. Incomes have soared an average of 25 percent. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at PHYSICIANS and HEALTH CARE REFORM Commentaries and Controversies*

Primary Care Doctors And The Medicare Boycott

I saw this interesting article linked to from a blog about angry doctors dropping out of Medicare in Texas. As one who shares the universal annoyance at congress’ failure to fix the SGR for more than 30 days at a time, I was kind of cheered by this. That’s what it will take to get the system fixed — a grassroots, full-scale rejection of the system! Good for them. And the opening lines of the article were encouraging:

Texas doctors are opting out of Medicare at alarming rates, frustrated by reimbursement cuts they say make participation in government-funded care of seniors unaffordable.

An “alarming” rate. Wow. Cool. So how many is that, anyway?

More than 300 doctors have dropped the program in the last two years, including 50 in the first three months of 2010, according to data compiled by the Houston Chronicle. Texas Medical Association officials, who conducted the 2008 survey, said the numbers far exceeded their assumptions.

That’s 300, right? Hmm, not too shabby. Not exactly going to topple the state with that, but it’s a start.

Hey, I wonder how many doctors there are in Texas, anyway? I hear it’s a pretty big state, though I seem to recall it consists mostly of scrubland and swamp. Maybe there are only like 500 doctors in the state to start with. Something is tickling my head about Texas, though, I vaguely remember that they had some nice tort reform law a few years ago that I was pretty envious of. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Movin' Meat*

Money Isn’t Everything In Primary Care

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*

Healthcare Training In High School

Yep, you read that right. The Chicago Public Schools, not exactly known for quality education, have a plan for training our future healthcare providers — high school:

Chicago Public Schools this fall will open the city’s first high school specializing in healthcare, a move local hospitals hope will help relieve chronic workforce shortages.

The school, which recently used a lottery system to enroll a freshman class of 160, will have a heavy emphasis on math and science. Juniors and seniors will be able to earn credits by shadowing hospital workers and interning as assistant nurses and in other professions.

Planners aim to prepare students for health- and science-related college programs and certify them for entry-level jobs in healthcare, such as pharmacy technicians or assistant physical therapists.

So this is what the Department of Labor had in mind for their healthcare education funds? Wow.

-WesMusings of a cardiologist and cardiac electrophysiologist.

*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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