I made my 10:20 a.m. patient wait while I told my support staff about my day off. “I was getting an ice cream when I saw a car accident. By the time I got there, it was clear that there were no serious injuries and all I did was to distract the p…
Category: primary care
How coding is like Scrabble
One of the great nuisances in medicine is diagnosis coding. According to Medicare and insurance companies across the U.S., each and every disease must have a unique number. Everything must be quantified and recorded. Why? To facilitate analysis, number…
Drs. Lynette Charity and C. Nicole Swiner highlight the Indiana State Medical Association’s 2019 Annual Convention
Indiana physicians! I’m excited to announce that two speakers from Physician Speaking by KevinMD, Drs. Lynette Charity and Nicole Swiner, will be conducting a day-long physician wellness workshop at the Indiana State Medical Association’s 2…
Clinical performance data: a physician’s friend or foe?
According to a recent Harvard report, physician burnout is “a public health crisis that urgently demands action.” Half of all doctors report troubling symptoms: depression, exhaustion, dissatisfaction, and a sense of failure. These physicians are twice…
New doctors are prioritizing the wrong things
Every year, there’s this rite of passage, the passing of the baton, as our graduating senior residents move on to fellowships, or into spots as hospitalists, or to practice jobs here in New York City or other cities, and a fresh new group of newl…
Medicine is too complex for computers to keep up with or understand
Family physicians and others have for years complained about ridiculous quality measures such as the meaningless use program, HEDIS, MACRA, etc. To its credit, the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality was willing to take a step back and ask, “Wh…
Replace doctors with robots now, please
It’s a widely held belief that eventually all living human doctors will be replaced by robots. Some say as soon as 2035. I say, “Why wait? Replace me now!” If the idea of a robot diagnosing and treating — and examining — you and your loved ones seems o…
Stop nickel and diming doctors
So, who doesn’t want a better health care system? We are barraged with stories in the medical literature and in the public press about the terrible state of our health care system, what poor outcomes we have, the inefficiencies in care, complaint…
The time to listen saved this doctor
I was struck by the difference between my care and that of the rest of the system as I cared for a patient recently. She was complaining of a strange pulsating noise in her ear that had started a few weeks before. We chatted for a while, as I asked abo…
A doctor survived a day without a computer. Here’s how he did it.
It wasn’t even nine o’clock when the screen on my laptop suddenly froze. From that moment until my last patient left the building, my clinic had no internet. For my part, the day went pretty smoothly, mostly because of some of my own work habits. It al…
