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Latest Posts

Just Rest

“I’m tired,” I recently told a friend. He looked at me with a hint of a smile and gave the obvious answer: “Then you need to rest.”

This simple yet elusive answer hit me squarely. I spend a large portion of my life being tired, yet I don’t know how to rest. Sure, I waste a lot of time doing things that are unproductive, but they’re more of a distraction or an escape — they aren’t about rest. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Musings of a Distractible Mind*

A New “Message” From Your Doctor’s Answering Service

Proof that cutting costs might affect quality of care — when a new, cheaper answering service at a doctor’s office answers the phone after hours:

“Cardiac electro-psychology. How may I help you?”

Sad, but true. (At least it was worth a chuckle.) 

-WesMusings of a cardiologist and cardiac electrophysiologist.

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

Technology And Home-Based Healthcare

Eric Dishman, a behavioral scientist who works at Intel, discusses how technology can impact home-based healthcare. From TEDMED 2009:

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

Can At-Home Telemonitoring Improve Care And Reimbursement?

Dr. John D. Halamka, Chief Information Officer of both Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, has a review up on his “Life as a Healthcare CIO” blog of the Withings Wi-Fi Scale.

The device can now upload readings into Google Health, and Dr. Halamka thinks similar capabilities in other at-home medical devices can be used to evaluate alternative quality contracts that reimburse clinics based on improvement in preventive care.

*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*

Primary Care: Will NPs replace MDs?

More unhealthy people are being herded into our healthcare system and more doctors are exiting. That’s the perfect formula for chaos.

I’d like to welcome the nursing profession here to save the day. Nurses have taken up the call for providing that missing link of access as doctors disappear. The expansion of nursing care to replace medical care in primary care is just the beginning of the next phase of American medicine. It all depends on how you define primary care. What can be cheaper must be done cheaper. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at The Happy Hospitalist*

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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