As a physician who has spent his career taking care of people with HIV/AIDS, cancer and various blood disorders, this is an amazing time to be working in these overlapping fields of medicine. I began my training when roughly half the people diagnosed w…
Patient access to care is a high priority for all neurosurgeons. Unfortunately, many of our practices are thwarted in these efforts from unwarranted insurance denials. Know, you are not alone. Take this common scenario: When Ms. Mary Smith (not the pat…
There was a point in my life when the words “climate change” would recall pictures of polar bears marooned on precarious chunks of ice, bobbing aimlessly in some foreign landscape of tundra and sea. While tragic, the environmental drama playing out at …
One time, I applied for an emergency department (ED) nurse manager position. I thought I had the job locked up until I was asked during the interview how I would “enforce metrics.” “Enforce.” My holistic, qualitative research-based response to this aut…
Among modern industrialized nations, only the United States endures the current public health epidemic of firearm-assisted injury and death. In 2017, nearly 40,000 people were shot to death in the U.S., while proponents of the Second Amendment continue…
The Trump administration has proposed that insurance plans providing drug coverage to Medicare beneficiaries will no longer be forced to cover six hitherto “protected” drug classes. The classes — which include drugs for psychiatric conditio…
How do we change the way we think about taking care of patients, particularly when it comes to not the individual patient sitting in front of us, but a whole population of patients just like them (or somewhat like them)? In our practice, we have been s…
The term “physician compensation” could be among the top phrases in health care this year. Though it’s always been a hot topic, it got hotter when the Trump administration announced a proposal that would affect nearly 40 percent of Medicare payments. T…
This article is sponsored by Careers by KevinMD.com. To err is human, and in the health care arena, avoiding errors is crucial. Efforts to address communication-related or “soft skill” failures have been ongoing since about 20 years ago when the Instit…
In the United States, 25 million adult women are insured by their state Medicaid program. Medicaid covers 60 percent of all births in the United States as per federal law, and states must cover all pregnancy-related services for pregnant women with inc…
