Telemedicine and HealthIT

I couldn’t really blame the social worker.  He was just doing his job.  The skilled nursing facility (SNF) connected to the hospital was full of flailing patients.  So he thought he would ask for a palliative care consult (after getting an okay from the primary team).  It was his third request of the day.  He [...]

Brought to you by MedPage Today. 1. NSAID Use Raises Heart Risk in Arthritis. atients with rheumatoid arthritis and other inflammatory musculoskeletal diseases continue to be treated with nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), even with their high risk for ischemic heart disease. 2. Mom’s Worrying Linked to Kid’s Asthma. Adolescents with asthma reported worse symptoms of [...]

A guest column by the American Medical Association, exclusive to KevinMD.com. To close the gaps between how medical students are educated and how health care is delivered now and in the future, the American Medical Association (AMA) has awarded $11 million to 11 U.S. medical schools to fund their bold proposals that support a significant redesign of [...]

When I visited Allan in the hospital yesterday, I told him to get up and stroll the hall. However, when I checked in on him this afternoon, the nurses informed me that he refused to get up, even to the chair.  When I asked why, Allan told me he could not walk.  I was concerned, [...]

Dr. Sam Ko says resident work hours should be limited to 40 per week. Via Twitter, I warned him that I would rebut his assertion. Without any data or references except a tangential one, he bases his opinion on four premises. 1. Residents will be happier and nicer to patients because they will be less [...]

Do you find yourself spending too much time on things that have nothing to do with seeing patients, and then getting home later than you would like? Do you notice that for every 15 minutes you spend with a patient you spend way more than that messing around in the EMR and being distracted by [...]

The Food and Drug Administration was created in 1927 in order to carry out the mission of the Food and Drug Act put into effect by Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. In the early 1900′s and before, medicines killed and maimed people in gruesome ways and adding chemical substances to foods to mask the fact that [...]

As someone who professionally closely tracks the debate over the transformation of the American health care clinical delivery system, I did not learn much new from the New York Times article: The $2.7 Trillion Medical Bill.  I did find the article’s approach useful in explaining how the wide variations in price for procedures contribute to the [...]

Hi , I have secured a place for msc in health informatics at UCL .I have a bachelor degree in biotechnology and a post graduate certificate in bioinformatics .I am working as a pharmacy technician and have done some courses in pharmacy as well. I am not quite sure of the kind of job someone like me ,who is not a doctor or a clinician ,will get after msc in health informatics. I need some advise from any former student of UCL CHIME or anyone in this field…

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid recently released its compiled data on what over 3,000 hospitals across the country charge for 100 of the most common discharge diagnostic codes under the diagnosis related group (DRG) system, and boy did the DRG really hit the fan.  Liberals, economists, and band wagoners got all upset about the [...]

Maligned over the last decade as places to avoid because of the price of the care they delivered, a study by the RAND Corporation goes a long way toward improving the image of hospital emergency rooms (ERs). The ER price tag was too high for the insurance companies that paid the bills, so many of [...]

Sometimes you just get lucky. When I was pregnant with my first child, during my radiation oncology residency, we had a guy living in the apartment over our garage, which we liked to refer to as “the carriage house.” He was a dog trainer by trade, and in his spare time he played softball in [...]

An excerpt from What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine. Excerpted with permission by Beacon Press. The stat cardiac-arrest page came through on my beeper at exactly the same moment as the hospital-wide PA system announced, “Code 411, cardiac arrest, MICU.” The operator chanted the mantra over and over with studied deliberativeness, as though [...]

Today I am going to write about how the US could save up to 10% on its healthcare bill. The US spends more on health care than any other nation, $8,500 per person per year. Multiply that by 300 million people and try to grasp the vast sum of $2,5 trillion. A lot of changes [...]

As a 24-hour-a-day, seven days a week, on-call nurse practitioner serving elderly and frail patients, my work day is anything but typical. I start my day not at a hospital or clinic, but at my dining room table. There, I document patient visits from the day before, write up my notes and place an average [...]

Hospitals that are already struggling financially to stay afloat face significant challenges in the coming months and years under some of the provisions of Obamacare. Under the Affordable Care Act’s Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program, hospitals that readmit certain patients within 30 days of discharge could face significant penalties. The question is whether hospitals really have [...]

An 85-year-old woman with moderate Alzheimer’s disease who enjoys walking in her nursing home’s garden with her walker has fallen and broken her hip. An advance directive signed by the patient states a preference for “comfort measures only,” and specifically states that she does not want to be transferred to the hospital. The physician believes [...]