Healthcare Myths
I recommend reading Charles Krauthammer’s The health-care myths we live by in the Washington Post. Let me tease you with a little bit about the myths he debunks:
- Emergency Room Usage – “Perhaps they still preferred the immediacy of the ER to waiting for an office appointment with a physician.”
- Medicaid’s Effect on Health – “Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first two years.”
- Electronic Medical Record Will Save Zillions – “The EHR are so absurdly complex, detailed, tiresome and wasteful that if the doctor is to fill them out, he can barely talk to and examine the patient, let alone make eye contact — which is why you go to the doctor in the first place.
Oh, but there is so much more that Charles is missing. He needs to be reading this blog regularly.
Good Krauthamer piece. As a boarded ER doc, I think that there are some patients who simply prefer the interventional acute care model instead of the preventative model of health care. They only want care when they’re sick and the ER is always ready there to give it. The EHR, at least for me, has been a blessing. I can move quickly, order tests and treatments in a blink, and keep track of all the patients that I see. I think that doing an H&P while documenting it on a laptop can be done without losing the essential doctor-patient relationship.