When Will Technology Actually Transform Healthcare?

“Health care is overwhelmed by “fast, cheap, and out of control” technologies,” writes Joe Flower.

Every new device will revolutionize healthcare, right? We hear this all the time. And, to be fair, we’re tech nerds here in the Atlas MD office.

However, we have a major caveat to our passion for healthcare tech.

In our case, we are excited about iterating on our EMR that eliminates the waste in your direct care practice.

And by eliminating the waste in your practice, we’re helping you to re-imagine how you get paid in your practice.

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Pamela Wible Shares A Day Of Ideal Medicine

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.

Read Dr. Wible’s complete post on KevinMD.com

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.

Insurance-Based Primary Care Won’t Prevent Obesity

Recently, someone asked me on Twitter, “Has the change in classification of obesity as a disease affected how you treat patients presenting w/ the disease?”

The classification change in question is regarding the American Medical Association’s declaration that obesity is a disease rather than a comorbidity factor.

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Stephen Schimpff Wants To Spend More Than 10 Minutes With His Patients

You call for an appointment and are told it will be about 20 days.

You arrive on time only to sit in the apt named waiting room for 40 minutes.

You see your primary care doctor (PCP).

You start to explain why you came in.

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Direct Care Blackup Plan: 8 Reasons To Go Locum Tenens

We know that physicians are unhappy with the way things are going in healthcare.

Some even believe that up to a third of the US physician work force is planning to leave the profession in the next 3 years

Direct primary care practices are the single best way to restore patient and provider satisfaction. Those brave enough to cut the red tape (i.e. health insurers, both public and private) find a remarkable reduction in billing paperwork, unrecovered fees, and electronic documentation requirements.

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Pay Kevin MD Like A French Doctor (Or Get Your Numbers Straight Before Blaming Doc Salaries For Overspending.)

Whenever new physician salary data is released, reporters and policy experts often compare doctor salaries in the United States to those of other countries: most notably, France. But Kevin Pho isn’t pleased.

That’s because because, practically on cue, Vox’s Sarah Kliff — regarded by thought leaders an excellent healthcare writer, is “uncharacteristically” lazy in framing physician salaries through a biased lens.

She writes, “Primary care doctors in the United States, do tend to earn a lot more than their counterparts abroad. One 2011 study, which looked at doctor salaries from 2008, found that the average primary care doctor in France earns about $95,000, compared to the $186,000 that physicians net in the United States.”

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The ICD-10 Emperor Has No Clothes

They howled ICD-10 was delayed. And they howled loud and fierce.

Apparently, the life of U.S. healthcare hangs in the throes of 68,000 diagnosis codes.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world has switched to ICD-10. But here’s a secret. The World Health Organization’s version of ICD-10 has about 16,000 codes, equivalent to ICD-9-CM.

Let’s reiterate: The rest of the world is not using ICD-10-Clinical Modification set, which has 68,000 codes.

The Canadian version of ICD-10 has about 16,000 codes, but the physicians do not use those codes for billing and reimbursement. They use a more limited code set of about 600 three-digit codes.

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Yes, Being A Doctor Became Miserable. That’s Why I Became A Direct Care Doctor Instead.

Originally posted on KevinMD.com

“Nine of 10 doctors discourage others from joining the profession,” writes Daniela Drake on the Daily Beast.

And stats say that by the end of 2014, ~300 physicians commit suicide.

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The Benefits Of Price Transparency Are Overstated. The Benefits Of An Accessible Doctor You Trust Can’t Be Stated.

Maybe you heard something like this on the radio recently: A mom takes her new baby to the emergency department on a weekend because she thinks her daughter might have a urinary tract infection. She’s right, but regulations say the baby has to stay in the hospital for two days to ensure the infection clears. Afterwards, the mom is surprised by and concerned about a $7,000 hospital bill for the baby’s care.

The reporter says that since more companies are purchasing high-deductible health plans for their employees, it’s increasingly important that people can find out the price of their care so they can make better choices.

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Elephant In The Room — The Projected Primary Care Shortage

Projecting future physician workforce needs is a challenging calculation. You have to consider multiple variables to avoid missing the mark. In the mid-1990s, the American Medical Association confidently predicted that the penetration of managed care would lead to a large “physician surplus” and convinced Congress to cap the number of graduate medical education (GME) positions subsidized by the Medicare program. By the look of things today, that might not have been such a wise move.

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