My Health Direct - patient referral management, physician practice development, hospital emergency room leakage, charity, care, indigent, project access, milwaukee cares, reduce non-emergent visits, on-line scheduling, automated intake and referral servic. Health Blog : The Newest Vital Sign: Your Credit Score. To figure out which patients are likely to pay their bills and which ones are best written off as charity cases, hospitals are peering into patients’ financial records.
Some are using traditional credit scores that are used for things like car loans and mortgages. Others are buying reports specially tailored to predict the likelihood that a patient will pay a big medical bill, the WSJ reports. Hospitals say it allows them to figure out more quickly which patients qualify for financial assistance programs, and makes them less likely to hound people who can’t or won’t pay.
Some consumer advocates warn that the process could lead hospitals to deny elective procedures to patients unlikely to pay. Hospitals say that isn’t happening. Not surprisingly, how patients feel about hospital credit checks depends largely on whether the checks are likely to help or hurt them financially. The Health Care Blog: Pilots Use Checklists. Doctors Don't. Why Not? By Maggie Mahar. Pilots Use Checklists.
Doctors Don’t. Why Not? This is a question Dr. Atul Gawande explores in the December 10 issue of The New Yorker. “The Checklist”is a shocking story, it’s an important story—and it’s also very long. “What makes her recovery astounding,” Gawande writes, is "the idea that a group of people in an ordinary hospital could do something so enormously complex. This, Gawande says, is what happens in intensive care units, every day of the year, all across the country. American medicine doesn’t do too badly. The complexity and intensity of the care is astounding. “This is the reality of intensive care,”Gawande adds.
Gawande then turns to the story of how pilots began making checklists. The cause of the crash? Perhaps the pilot should have had more training. With that checklist, “pilots would go on to fly the Model 299 a total of 1.8 million miles without one accident,” Gawande writes. Could something as simple as a checklist help hospitals? But then he caught a break. None. The Health Care Blog: How to read articles about health and health care. By Alicia White If you’ve just read a health-related headline that’s caused you to spit out your morning coffee (“Coffee causes cancer” usually does the trick) it’s always best to follow the Blitz slogan: “Keep Calm and Carry On.”
On reading further you’ll often find the headline has left out something important, like “Injecting five rats with really highly concentrated coffee solution caused some changes in cells that might lead to tumors eventually. (Not to mention that the study was funded by The Association of Tea Marketing)The most important rule to remember: “Don’t automatically believe the headline.” It is there to draw you into buying the paper and reading the story.
Would you read an article called “Coffee pretty unlikely to cause cancer, but you never know?” Primary Care is ‘Jewel’ in the Crown of British Health Care - Health Blog. Socialized health care in the U.K. isn’t so bad, write two U.K. academics in a piece published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
In fact, the authors say the British system has two major strengths that the U.S. can learn from: strong primary care and NICE, the agency that assesses and approves reimbursement for cost-effective treatments. Primary care docs in the U.K. are well-trained and are thus able to reduce hospitalizations, unwarranted investigations and unneeded prescriptions. Extra fees may save private practice primary care. Toni Brayer, MD | Physician | June 17, 2010 I was interested in an article in USA Today about the growing number of physicians, especially primary care doctors, who are boosting their revenues by requiring patients to pay new fees for services that insurance doesn’t cover.
No longer is your insurance payment “all-inclusive”. These fees can include annual administration fees, no-show fees, medical report fees, and extra fees for email or phone consultations. If private practice medicine is going to survive, these fees are a necessity. Health-Care Secret Revealed, Again: More Is Not Better - Health Blog. If there’s any way out of our current health-care morass, it’s this: In health care, more expensive care is often no better than less expensive care.
We were reminded of this fact by a front-page story in this morning’s WSJ, which points out that Pennsylvania is the rare state that requires hospitals to publicly report a wide range of data — and those data show hospitals with good outcomes are often cheaper than hospitals with bad outcomes, even after you adjust for the patient mix. While Pennsylvania’s reporting requirements are unique, the core lesson here is familiar. As we noted last year, Wyoming coal companies figured out that they could save money by sending their workers to fancy facilities like the Mayo Clinic. The Health Care Blog: How to Rein in Medical Costs, RIGHT NOW.
By GEORGE LUNDBERG I believe that there are still many ethical and professional American physicians and many intelligent American patients who are capable of, in an alliance of patients and physicians, doing “the right things”.
Their combined clout is being underestimated in the current healthcare reform debate. Efforts to control American medical costs date from at least 1932. With few exceptions, they have failed. Health care reform, 2009 politics-style, is again in trouble over cost control. The Health Care Blog: Commentology: Thoughts on the Death of Primary Care. Vance Harris MD writes: We are our own worst enemies, as we have allowed insurance companies and Medicare to set the value of our services.
Clearly those values they impose have nothing to do with our contribution to the health of our patients or the cost savings we bring about.Case in point: How many dozens of chest pain patients have I seen in the last month who I didn’t order an EKG, get a consult, set up nuclear imaging or send for a cath? Only I have the advantage of knowing just how anxious most of these patients are and that they have had the same symptoms time and again over the last 20 years. After a pointed history and exam, I am more than willing to make the call that 27 hours of chest pain is most likely not angina in nature. Better Health » The Five Biggest Misconceptions In Healthcare.
September 9th, 2009 by EvanFalchukJD in Better Health Network, Health Policy Newsweek tries to refute the “Five Biggest Lies In the Health Care Debate.”
