“I love selling,” said no doctor ever. Doctors often love buying. Expensive cars. Fancy watches. Luxury vacations. Hello, lifestyle upgrade! But very few love selling. I find it is a common response to look at salespeople with disdain. Phar…
Category: primary care
May the needs of others become personal to you
The hands were heavily stained black, the skin with severe eczematous changes, yet she did not mention them. She was a young mother who had come to the clinic to have her six-month-old baby boy seen by the “doctors from America.” I was the …
Opportunities from the coding changes in primary care [PODCAST]
“There’s a new best practice emerging, one that lets you deliver a high standard of care today but that well-prepares you for a shift to value. We’ve been talking about it throughout this article series in terms of doing more with less and making…
When primary care helps a psychiatrist
“Do you plan to cut down on your hours?” This was what my primary care doctor asked me after she found me complaining about multiple somatic symptoms. As a psychiatrist, I always took pride in how I prioritized my family’s needs and f…
Break the rules of health care with technology
In the 21st century, all but one U.S. industry has used information technology (IT) to cut costs, increase access to products and services, and improve quality. Health care is the lone exception. For decades, medical costs have risen faster than inflat…
Keep healthy boundaries and not define yourself by your profession
The COVID-19 pandemic helped bring out people’s true colors. After two years of the unrelenting pressures of the pandemic, people’s true colors came out, and I will have a frank about this truth. As physicians, we often put our patient̵…
Changing how we think about difficult patients
An excerpt from Changing How We Think About Difficult Patients: A Guide for Physicians and Healthcare Professionals. After I finished my residency in EM and started working as an attending physician, I realized I had a problem. I believe a lot of you h…
A shout out to small hospitals [PODCAST]
“I’m a small-time doc in a small town, and I work at a small hospital in the Midwest, and I’m proud of it. The huge university hospitals (like Cleveland Clinic) get all the glory (especially in society and in the press), but small hospitals like …
Metric fever will decimate our primary care workforce
Primary care doctors have had enough. I’m sick of it as a family physician, and I know you are too. In our never-ending battle with insurance companies and CMS bureaucrats over how to do our job, the new turf is value-based care (VBC), and the la…
Danielle Ofri, MD on sharing stories and the emotional epidemiology of disease [PODCAST]
This episode is sponsored by Athelas, the number one provider of remote patient monitoring. “This last mile of the COVID pandemic—Omicron or not—is a painstaking one-on-one endeavor. As is most of primary care. Sadly, we now have to deal with pol…
