Health care is big business, with medical practices vying for contracts, hospitals undergoing facelifts in order to cater to patient experiences, and insurance companies making deals with pharmacies. Some of these arrangements are negotiated in the na…
Category: KevinMD
3 things every hospital should invest in
In the current health care system, patient outcomes, and patient satisfaction are increasingly important. With the hospital value-based purchasing program, Medicare adjusts payments to hospitals based on the quality of patient care they provide. Hospit…
Does the patient come last in health care?
In the service industry — which as physicians, we certainly are a part of — a popular saying is that the customer always comes first. The implication is that in order to thrive in an industry, you have to cater to the customers/patients as it is they w…
Great books make better doctors
After spending much of the first 40 years of my life poring over textbooks and medical journals, I decided to start reading literary fiction. At the time, I had no ulterior motive — only a vague sense that I had been missing something important, a meta…
Don’t judge patients for researching their health issues
It’s difficult to imagine a world now without Google and the internet. It’s also strange to think that most people alive right now received the bulk of their education in the pre-internet era. I remember in the United Kingdom, where I went to medical s…
Physician-assisted suicide is a collaborative process
Who remembers Jack Kevorkian, Doctor Death? He was found guilty in 1998 of second-degree murder. Still, it was because of his advocacy that the terminally ill patient’s right to die by physician-assisted suicide was propelled into the public aren…
“How are you doing?” A simple question with a big impact.
From October 25 to October 29, 2019, more than 10,000 pediatricians from all over the world gathered in the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, to attend the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) National Conference and Exhibition. As the world’s larg…
Where have all the doctors gone?
As my husband passed the milestone birthday of 40, he thought it would be a good idea to get a physical exam as it had been several years since he saw a physician. Easy task, right? We soon came to find that the landscape of health care had been changi…
The medical profession is struggling to preserve humanity in a cut and paste world
Physicians and nurses deal with the deepest issues of the human condition: life and death. Our profession brings new life into the world and does our best to bring comfort and peace at the journey’s end. It is a profound and emotional experience for me…
Don’t forget to manage your patients’ dignity
Just before I induced anesthesia, he said, “Doc, I want to apologize beforehand. I am incontinent due to a previous surgery so I might wet the sheets.” I told him not to worry and that we understood and that “these things do happen.” …
