Posted by: AtlasMD

September 23, 2013

SUMMARY: Walgreens to Shift Health Plan for 160,000 Workers

Timothy W. Martin and Christopher Weaver published an article on The Wall Street Journal about an announcement that Walgreen Co. is making a sweeping policy change in light of approaching federal healthcare reform. “On Wednesday, the drugstore giant disclosed a plan to provide payments to eligible employees for the subsidized purchase of insurance starting in 2014. The plan will affect roughly 160,000 employees, and will require them to shop for coverage on a private health-insurance marketplace.”

So why the sudden change in policy?
Aside from rising healthcare costs (the complex causes were speedily explained by John Green in his Vlog Brothers video), the company cited “compliance-related expenses associated with the new law” as a reason for the switch.

Is this a trend?
 Read more

Posted by: AtlasMD

September 23, 2013

A Patient Portal To Nowhere

We freaking love Stephen Wilkins over at Mind The Gap. You get a perspective we don’t find as often on the annals of the Web, doctors and healthcare providers sharing their experiences seeing another doctor. Recently, Stephen was given his first and very own patient portal, a way to “take an active role in his healthcare.” His excitement was shortlived, though, since the first email he received was kind of a huge letdown — he had no access to his doctor, no access to his records, and when he thought about it, he was even a bit insulted. Wasn’t going to the doctor, exercising, taking his meds, etc., all part of an active role in his healthcare? This patient portal offered nothing active, except emailing nurses and staff instead of his doctor.

READ ABOUT STEPHEN WILKINS’ PATIENT PORTAL EXPERIENCE FIRSTHAND

Yes, healthcare needs to take advantage of the digital tools at our disposal. But doctors, let’s not insult our patient’s intelligence. Perhaps we don’t even need to directly engage them so much as make ourselves available, helpful and NOT disengaging.

Posted by: AtlasMD

September 21, 2013

Year One Is Mission Critical For Your Direct Care Practice

Michael Tetreault of Direct Primary Care Journal ran a survey suggesting that 10% of direct care practices close up shop after the first year. As with any business the first year is extremely important, and a place where bankruptcy can halt any future plans.

So how can you make it through this phase, recruit patients and bring in a healthy revenue stream? DPCJ offers 7 key steps including the importance of face-time, location planning, minimizing expenses everywhere you can, and pre-planning for emergencies. We’ll stress one of their steps in particular — determining your business model and sticking with the plan. Figure out where your revenue is coming from and how you’re going to achieve that. How many patients do you need to recruit every month to stay afloat through year one? How are you going to market your practice? How well do you know you offerings so you can sell without coming across like you’re selling used cars?

CHECK OUT 7 STEPS TOWARDS DIRECT CARE SUCCESS IN YEAR ONE

We encourage docs to work with our new EMR, Atlas.md. It’s built specifically to help doctors easily collect monthly revenue and not get burnt out trying to do bookkeeping. We also encourage docs ready to take the first step to send us an email and give us a call. We’re more than happy to counsel any doc through the transition, the first year of operation, and beyond. Direct care is small, but we’re gaining recognition. And it’s only going to keep up the momentum if we work together.

Posted by: AtlasMD

September 19, 2013

An Ex-Google Health Product Manager Talks About What’s Next in Health Data

Missy-Krasner-Smiling-Small-3.1.2012AMissy Krasner was brought on to Google Health in April of 2006 — a time she calls “pre-social, pre-quantified-self and pre-internet-of-things.” Google was trying to create a central repository for consumers to collect and store their health records, and they wanted to make the APIs available for developers so they could integrate this data into their own applications. She might have been too early in the game, because Google Health rolled up shop. But Krasner is now entrepreneur-in-residence at Morgenthaler Ventures and a startup mentor. She has a lot to say about health data and its potential benefits.

Krasner says newer PHRs are getting business if they have amazing (user interfaces) — if they’re beautiful, if they have companion user apps, and they’re social. Companies don’t just say “we want to structure your data; now we want to connect you with other people who have your same illness, if you’re comfortable with that.” Leave it someone at the top of the tech industry to remind us that big companies are expecting more from technology (in opposition of that stagnant acceptance of archaic EMR still bogging down countless docs).

SEE WHAT’S NEXT IN PHR ACCORDING TO MISSY KRASNER

We’re not scaled at the level of Google, but we are on board with this type of agile thinking. That’s why we’re working to integrate FitBit into our Atlas.md EMR software. This will be the first PHR that our EMR communicates with. From there we’ll continue to iterate our software to communicate with other PHR over time, specifically ones that patients find helpful and trust using. The goal here is to facilitate healthier decisions for patients and help doctors understand what their patients habits are, and what can be done to improve their health.

Photo of Missy Krasner courtesy of Morgenthaler.com

Posted by: AtlasMD

September 19, 2013

Betsy McCaughey Stands For EMR Security And Against Government Interrogations

Wouldn’t you be off put if your dermatologist asked, “How many sex partners do you currently have?” Well what if we told you that new Obamacare legislation would make these types of arbitrary questions mandatory, and necessary for all doctors to include within patient EMRs just so that practices weren’t fined? Okay, but the data will be safe within the patient EMR, right? Well, sure, maybe the government just checks to see if the box was filled out and doesn’t abuse their power. But even if kept “private” in the best case scenario, there’s a new problem — what if patients just lie in order to protect themselves, and their privacy? Well then we have a new problem, we’ve tied more of that red tape around doctors, getting them to do more tasks that accomplish nothing. This is the red tape we keep mentioning as one of many culprits contributing to expensive healthcare in America.

Yes, we’ve chosen to polarize the above assumptions to illustrate the potential setbacks of this type of legislative intrusion. Now say we take the middle ground and accept, okay, EMRs are secure and patients are honest. Why the heck does my dermatologist need to know how many people I slept with to treat an external skin condition?

READ BETSY McCAUGHEY’S STANCE ON OBAMACARE AND EMR REGULATION

Needless to say, she is opinionated, and a little assumptive. This can be a good thing, though, because we need investigative journalism to get to the bottom of what’s inside those thousands of pages of legislation. We’re guessing that as more of these line items are exposed McCaughhey will not be the only person yelling fire in this great big American healthcare theater.

Posted by: AtlasMD

September 18, 2013

A Day In The Life Of A Click-Happy EMR

We almost titled this post, A Day In The Morning…, because in Dr. Fred N. Pelzman’s case, he has to click through 50 meaningless fields and CTRL + ALT + DEL things, before he’s even gotten his morning coffee. Then there were the 12 arbitrary nutrition prompts that were finally whittled down to one semi-helpful question. Of course, skipping this portion required additional clicks. And don’t forget the auto-scheduling of colonoscopies ten years down the road, regardless of the fact that some patients needed a screening one, two, or five years later instead. But Pelzman describes his daily EMR experience as useful, like mashing clay in a pot with a stick and plotting patient data in cuneiform and then translating it back to English with pen and paper. Ouch. Seriously, doctor, we feel for you. We prefer our mornings meaningful, and useful, not meaningfully useless.

READ ABOUT DR. PELZMAN’S EMR EXPERIENCE ON KEVIN MD

And we agree completely. Patient care has nothing to do with how many times we click on something, how many different boxes we hastily fill out. But the way most EMR are designed nowadays, you’d think otherwise.

Posted by: AtlasMD

September 17, 2013

Who’d Have Thought Colonoscopies Could Explain it All

We’re glad that John Green directed us to this New York Times article from June. A story of Deirdre Yapalater’s colonoscopy illustrates many of the market failures driving up healthcare costs in America. The publication was kind enough to create an interactive map that lets you compare the average cost of a colonoscopy across the country, too. Very cool.

“… Ms. Yapalater recalled, she did not ask her doctors about the cost of her colonoscopy because it was covered by insurance and because ‘if a doctor says you need it, you don’t ask.’ In many other countries, price lists of common procedures are publicly available in every clinic and office. Here, it can be nearly impossible to find out.”

Yet again, we see the rebellious nature of our direct care model. Given, we aren’t performing colonoscopies here at Atlas MD, we ARE ADVOCATES FOR OUR PATIENTS, and will get in the trenches and negotiate fair prices. It’s in patients’ interest, and our interest, part of the beauty of the free market. But there’s more the article considers…

Read more

Posted by: AtlasMD

September 17, 2013

John Green Breaks Down The Inefficiency Of American Healthcare Spending

UPWORTHY linked us to a fantastic video from John Green, astronomically prolific writer and thinker, who explains why healthcare is SO EXPENSIVE IN AMERICA. It’s seven-minutes long but he covers EVERYTHING. Did he mention the red tape? Of course he did. And he also mentioned a fundamental reason for Americans overpaying for EVERYTHING healthcare-related. It’s rooted our inability to negotiate the prices we pay. One thing he didn’t mention? Direct care. And to his point, we are a David up against a Goliath system. But before we turn to the government to negotiate for us, let’s consider the alternatives, doctors like us who can use our power to help patients get the care they need at a price they can afford.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, Who is Hank? Hank is John’s brother. They have amassed over 300 million views on their vlog brothers YouTube channel where they take turns explaining things to each other.

Click through for some helpful links John Green provided along with the original video… Read more

Posted by: AtlasMD

September 16, 2013

Quality Trumps Quantity in Healthcare

tobyWe came across an article on LinkedIn discussing a new breakthrough. It’s not “scientifically” proven, more of a hypothesis really. Toby Cosgrove, CEO and President at Cleveland Clinic, says, “It’s the dawning realization that healthcare is not about how many patients you can see, how many tests and procedures you can order, or how much you can charge for these things.” Sounds like Atlas MD.

READ HIS BLOG POST ON LINKEDIN

SIDE NOTE: He ends with a strange promotion of Obamacare, which we do have our own questions about. And we’re equally surprised he didn’t mention direct care in his post. We’re earning profits offering unlimited doctors appointments and free telemedicine of sorts (Tweeting personal advice, making simple diagnoses via texting, Skyping with patients, etc.), and we’re doing it at prices far lower than insurance-based services. Couple that with our work to negotiate prescriptions for pennies on the dollar and steep discounts on MRIs and other procedures and it’s clear we are a quality-focused operation.

Photo of Toby Cosgrove courtesy of my.clevelandclinic.org

Posted by: AtlasMD

September 16, 2013

Telemedicine Bill Would Allow Docs To Practice Across State Lines

Medicare providers would be able to treat patients electronically across state lines without having to obtain multiple state medical licenses, according to new legislation proposed in the House this week. Cheers to ANY POLITICIAN WORKING TOWARDS LIMITING BUREAUCRACY.

Okay, so we’ve said red tape is never the way to go with primary care. But we do have to consider rural residents and people who might not have reasonable access to a direct care physician. In certain cases, especially with older patients on Medicare it might make more sense for them to see a physician across a state line, and do so using telemedicine.

For now, this seems like a promising development. Although, again so ironic, that NEW legislation is needed to correct a system bogged down by multiple state licensing. Again, we’re skeptical of a looming federal government controlling our entire healthcare insurance system. But, on the other hand, requiring doctors to get different licenses to see patients in different states gets silly, too. And, as is the case now, can prevent people from getting the quality care they deserve.

READ THE COMPLETE ARTICLE ON FIERCE HEALTH IT