A featured article titled “Death by A Thousand Clicks” addressed some of the serious problems and challenges we still face in the “digitization” of health care. As an early adopter of EHR since 2003 and a self-avowed “tech…
Category: Hospital-Based Medicine
What can be done to improve our maternal death rate?
Why does the most expensive health care system on the planet do such a poor job protecting the lives of pregnant women? More important, what can be done about it? The United States continues to lead the world in health care spending yet it has the high…
Hospital immobility is an encapsulation of our system’s fundamental flaws
Is your patient having trouble breathing? I can ask respiratory to give him a nebulizer. I’m looking at his chest X-ray now — why don’t we bump up that Lasix, too? I wish the ER would have grabbed an ultrasound of that swollen leg. Does he …
Hospital immobility is an encapsulation of our system’s fundamental flaws
Is your patient having trouble breathing? I can ask respiratory to give him a nebulizer. I’m looking at his chest X-ray now — why don’t we bump up that Lasix, too? I wish the ER would have grabbed an ultrasound of that swollen leg. Does he …
What charity care patients get big hospital bills
When Ashley Pintos went to the emergency room of St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma, Wash., in 2016, with a sharp pain in her abdomen and no insurance, a representative demanded a $500 deposit before treating her. “She said, ‘Do you have $200?’ I said…
To anyone in medicine: This is why listening matters
Victor Frankl is an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor, who survived three years in the concentration camps of Dachau and Auschwitz. He once told a story about a woman, his patient, who called him in the middle of the night sayi…
Should health care come with a money-back guarantee?
It may seem odd that a gastroenterologist patronizes fast food establishments several times each week. I’m in one right now as I write this. I eschew the food items –though French fries will forever tempt me – and opt for a large-sized beverage. In tru…
How do you determine that the dream of medicine is worth it?
I’m fascinated by the human body — the intricacies of it, the poetry of it. I am intrigued that a cell can come together with other cells to form tissues, those tissues, organs, and systems. The body is a powerful metaphor for unity: what happens…
The medical illiteracy epidemic
This past August, I attended the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) District VI meeting in Wisconsin. The theme of this year’s meeting was “Bringing it Back Home,” with a keynote presentation focused on develop…
How the changing roles of hospitals are isolating physicians
Physicians nearing the end of their careers often mourn the loss of the hospital as it once was — the undisputed center of the health care universe. They remember a time when every community doctor rounded on patients in the morning, and every su…
