October 17, 2013
Drs. Josh and Doug show off the Atlas.md dashboard. where you can access all of the app features. The modules are customizable so you can quickly access the features that are most important to your practice.
VIEW NEXT ATLAS.MD EMR TUTORIAL VIDEO > CLINIC FEATURES / SIDEBAR
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October 17, 2013
Yes, New York resident Chris Dorster suffers from occasional allergies, so he’s been known to sneeze a bit. However, there’s more than just pollen to sneeze at in his blog post. That’s because Chris currently doesn’t have prescription medication coverage. When his allergies flared up recently, he went in to see his doctor. There he was given a sample of a medication. The brand name nasal spray did the trick.
But the plot thickened. When Chris ran out of his sample he figured he’d pay cash for another tiny bottle of nasal spray. It can’t cost that much, he thought, maybe forty dollars?
October 10, 2013
Meet direct care’s first EMR and Practice Management software, envisioned by our doctors and in use here in our Wichita clinic. Drs. Josh and Doug will show you around the app in a series of How-To videos.
October 8, 2013
David Bornstein recently reported on doctor burnout, something we’ve been following over the last few years. This concern isn’t falling on deaf ears, instead half of the nation’s medical schools are reacting, by including a course called The Healer’s Art (this course was created by physician Rachel Naomi Remen, and according to Bornstein, helps “doctors and students discover and reconnect to the deep meaning of their work and maintain their commitment for it.”) His article caused a commotion on the Web, with hundreds of readers — patients, medical students, doctors and spouses and children of doctors among them — expressing their personal experiences. After we reviewed a host of comments, we noticed something missing in the conversation: direct care…
We’re all running out of time
One reader from New York writes, “I am a primary care doctor who started idealistic, and am disillusioned and dejected. By far, the biggest barrier to being a compassionate healer in our current working environment is time. We simply don’t have the time we need to do our jobs well. And we all lose.”
October 3, 2013
If you were tuned in to Hannity’s radio program yesterday you might have heard Dr. Josh talking about direct care. The entire taping includes dialogue with Pat Buchanan, Dr. and Congressman Phil Roe, and Congressman Louis Gohmert. Dr. Josh was given the floor to fully outline why direct care MAKES SENSE. Anyone questioning the business side of running a “cash-only” clinic should pay close attention here. Josh takes a solid ten minutes to explain almost EVERY benefit that this model brings to healthcare, including the doctors enjoying their work, the patients receiving improved treatment, and insurance companies finding that direct care patients are at lower risk for chronic conditions (which allows for lower premiums which in turn can attract more subscribers.)
October 2, 2013
* Our apologies, if the video fails to load you can watch it on FoxNews.com
In case you missed it, Dr. Josh was invited to speak on Fox News’ Your World. It makes a great companion to Doug’s appearance on Huckabee earlier this year.
It’s challenging to get your message across in one TV segment. However, this is a great place to start spreading the idea of direct care. Friends, family, colleagues, etc. are most likely frustrated with the current way they are receiving or administering healthcare, whether it be the pressure of paying monthly premiums, frustrations with finding docs within their network, the inevitable waits that are attached to any interaction, or traditional docs creating 3 minutes of admin work for every minute they treat patients.
If you think someone could benefit from direct care (patient or doctor) tweet this video. If they have questions, be prepared to address them.
Here are a few points that weren’t directly addressed in the video:
Read more
October 1, 2013
MIT Technology Review published an exciting article. Jeff Hammerbacher, a 30-year-old reputed as Facebook’s first data scientist, is working with The Mount Sinai Medical Center. He once said, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.” But those days are over. He wants to engineer data to help doctors better predict the likelihood of illness and complications.
Hammerbacher will apply his insight acquired while working to target online advertisements. These data-crunching techniques will be used to help doctors and researchers suck in medical information and spit out predictions. The hospital believes this data, if analyzed properly, could cut the cost of health care.
Will Big Data Promote Results-Driven Medicine?
Read more
September 30, 2013
The American Journal of Emergency Medicine conducted research and found that emergency doctors “spend significantly more time entering data into electronic health records than they do with patients.” The study concluded that “improved efficiency in data entry would allow emergency physicians to devote more time to patient care…”
According to the published paper, emergency physicians spent 43 percent of their time entering data on a given day. Only 28 percent of their time was spent directly interacting with patients. And, during a busy, 10-hour shift, total mouse clicks neared 4,000.
Here’s what the paper’s author, Robert Hill, M.D. from St. Luke’s University Health Network in Allentown, Pa., had to say:
“Emergency department physicians spend significantly more time entering data into electronic medical records than on any other activity, including direct patient care.”
He lists out factors that get in the way of efficient EHR usage, including operating system speed, server/mainframe responsiveness, typing skills, user-friendliness of system, interruptions, extent of training, opportunity to delegate tasks, and various environmental attributes. However, in his opinion, “Efficient use of the EMR system will increase physician productivity and hospital revenue.” We couldn’t agree more. If you agree with his thinking, too, you can tweet it right now.
September 25, 2013
A new installment of our podcast is live on iTunes. Obamacare is just a week away and the climate is already shifting. That said, we are working to better healthcare with a bipartisan approach, direct care. It’s this bottom up pressure that we believe will transform actual care.
First off, congrats to Dr. John and Dr. Henry who are busy running their new direct care practice in Pennsylvania. They are surprised to be doing the opposite of what most everyone else is doing. Ironically, it’s exactly what they always wanted to do: practice medicine.
LISTEN TO EPISODE 9 OF THE ATLAS MD PODCAST HERE
Drs. Josh and Doug answer more questions and concerns that have been brought up — Should you integrate health apps into your practice? How can doctors use this data effectively? Why is Josh such a fan of FitBit (it’s cool, connected and really helpful for starters)? Will medicine get to a point where docs can track diabetics’ A1c levels daily or weekly?
As always thanks for tuning in.
Also, Drs. Josh and Doug will be in St. Louis on Oct. 12 and 13 attending the first summit dedicated to direct primary care. Send them an email or tweet if you want to meet the docs in person.
September 24, 2013
It’s Dr. Josh here. We had a doctor write us in response to our Atlas MD price listing recently. The doc asked,
What about X-rays, MRI, and emergency visits like broken bones?
Thank you for the question. We’ll gladly expand on how we negotiate for discounted services.