June 13, 2014
by Pamela Wible
Johnny’s disabled. He can’t get to my office anymore. So I drive 100 miles up the Oregon coast to check in on him. I get lost, but finally discover his little white house on the edge of a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
Dr. Wible’s a huge inspiration for us in Wichita.
Please, take a moment to experience her day at the “office”, or in this case, a man’s house in Oregon adjacent to a 100-foot cliff.
June 10, 2014
Dr. Frank Morgan has been practicing medicine for 13 years in Greeley. Like many of his fellow primary care purists, he wanted to spend more time with his patients and less time dealing with insurance paperwork.
That’s why he founded his new direct primary care clinic, Balance Health, 1709 61st Ave. Here, like us, he treats his patients without accepting insurance. Instead, patients pay a $99 monthly subscription for access to his personal primary care services, as well as access to the clinic’s gym and nutritional advice services.
June 6, 2014
Thanks to Brian McTavish for covering Atlas MD at 1 Million Cups.
“Healthcare’s broken, and we’re here to fix it,” Umbehr said. Instead of taking insurance, Atlas MD charges patients a monthly membership fee—$10 for children and $50 to $100 for adults based on their age. Patients in return get unlimited visits, no co-pays, a variety of free procedures and wholesale pricing on prescriptions and lab work with discounts of up to 95 percent. In addition, Atlas MD works with employers to provide less expensive health care coverage for their employees.
June 6, 2014
Atlas.md EMR rolled out some new updates. Besides the improved features listed below, we also strengthened security measures to ensure better compliance with HIPAA standards.
Manage Your Shared Appointment Resources
Now your clinic can manage resources that they share in the practice facilities, such as a procedure room or a piece of equipment.
Improved Search Feature
We built a new search engine to help you complete advanced searches, fast.
Redesigned Online Bill Pay
Now Atlas.md EMR’s Pay Online page works aesthetically with your own clinic’s logo. It also gives your patients quick access to all of their past invoices.
Universal Autocomplete Support
The autocomplete feature works wherever you enter text in Atlas.md EMR.
New “Do-Not-Refill-Before” Notices On Prescriptions
Now when you fax Rx and refills to pharmacies, your clinic will be more compliant with regulations.
To follow up on suggestions from pharmacists we’ve been talking to, now if a prescription has a DEA controlled drug and that drug can be refilled, we display a “Do not refill before MM-DD-YYYY” notice for the pharmacists.
New Medication Savings Included In Patient Invoices
Now your patients can see the value they’re saving in ordering medications from your pratice’s inventory. We use the GoodRx database, which gives accurate prices in pharmacies all over the country (see example below of what your patients will see).
More Batch Actions When Billing
Now you can use batch actions when you are billing companies, e.g. print or email a batch of invoices, or print a batch of envelope labels instead of going one by one
Thanks for sharing your feedback with us. Keep it coming so we can make Direct Care’s EMR that much better.
June 2, 2014
KLAS, a national firm that measures EHR vendor performance, conducts an annual poll of healthcare providers, not only about the quality of their EHRs but also about make-or-break issues such as training, implementation, and support.
The gripes cover three main areas: One, EHRs have made the patient encounter far more annoying and complex than it ever was before.
Two, many physicians feel that EHRs take doctors who were trained to be independent thinkers and constrain their ability to make independent decisions, causing them to feel like data entry clerks, with a computer telling them how to practice medicine.
Last but not least, a large number of physicians feel that EHRs erode the doctor-patient relationship by creating a barrier between the two.
May 26, 2014
The federal government has granted itself potent new authority to expel physicians from Medicare if they are found to prescribe drugs in abusive ways, following through on a proposal issued earlier this year.
Excellent news! Now fee-for-service doctors can exist like Heller-esque protgaonists, trapped by the possibility of losing funding for over-prescribing, or losing funding by under-prescribing.
May 25, 2014
Early on, Dr. Pamela Wible was warned by her doctor family, “Don’t go into medicine.”
Of course, she went into medicine, and was met with grim circumstances — doctor after doctor she knew, killing themselves.
Now, in light of assembly-line medicine killing the souls of doctors, Dr. Wible has opened an ideal clinic that focuses on the patient-doctor relationship.
And she’s having a fun doing it.
May 19, 2014
Author, consultant and futurist Ian Morrison served up the opening keynote at the National Healthcare Innovation Summit on May 14 in Boston with a large dose of wit. But he delivered a somber message concerning the urgent need for innovation in healthcare.
“We have to innovate,” he told the audience. “We don’t have a choice. We have hit the wall.”
May 18, 2014
“It’s stressful, dirty, hard work, and the burnout rate is high,” said Tom McNulty, a 19-year-old college student who volunteers for an ambulance corps outside Rochester. He told the New York Times that he finds it fulfilling, but that he would not make it a career: “Financially, it’s not feasible.”
Turns out the healthcare industry is staffed by some of the lowest as well as highest paid professionals in any business. The average staff nurse is paid about $61,000 a year, and an emergency medical technician earns just about minimum wage, for a yearly income of $27,000, according to the Compdata analysis.
Did you know that many medics work two or three jobs just to get by?
May 15, 2014
I’m not sure if you’ve heard the parable of the tall man and the cat.
Maybe not, since I had to make it up in light of healthcare’s unending cost increase.
See in this allegorical village there was a group of citizens who were very upset with a man who lived there. This man was very, very tall, and he made all the villagers feel uneasy (they were insecure about the crowns of their heads, who knows why).
One night, a mob caravanned to the tall man’s house with tall, burning torches.