Ridiculous Studies of the Week: You Vote the Winner
There is so much medical garbage out there that I couldn’t pick which one was the worst. I need your help. Here are your nominees:
- A new study shows the number of Louisiana adults without health insurance has been cut in half since the state expanded its Medicaid program. (That’s interesting. So if you give some more people insurance then you reduce those who don’t have insurance? Is that new math?).
- A recent study on EHRs “showed that even after the EHR was established, both doctors and patients expressed dissatisfaction.” (You needed a study to prove that?).
- A study recently published in JAMA Network Open found that people with higher BMI also had increased BP and CVD related events. (So getting fat has repercussions?).
I know this one is tough. They are all idiotic in their own special way but someone has to take home the trophy. It’s your turn to figure this out. Which one is most ridiculous? Vote below:
[poll id=”3″]
What I love about these “studies” by morons who have not been in the trenches of Medicine. Yes, there are trenches! Is to work a day in primary care and deal with the challenges we face daily, and all day. Critical decision making on a very important and frequently life changing continuum. EHR compromises care, as does insurance concerns. Meeting a certain BMI or metric is a joke. I think the whole thing is crashing to earth because……. primary care is dying a slow death. We primary care doctors were the glue that held it all together. We are now dinosaurs that became extinct in a system that values RVU’s and pseudo doctors to the benefit of the hospitals and insurers for the almighty dollar. Talk with any patient, I do this daily. What do they want? A physician who is intelligent and skilled. More importantly, WHO CARES! The hospital system , EMR, administrator don’t CARE for the patients. They care about the EMR and the bottom line. Metrics won’t fix healthcare for the masses. Only competent physicians and patients who have skin in the game will make a difference. Back to the future!
Why can’t I vote for more than one!?!? Just remember, someone got paid for these studies, and we all probably somehow indirectly paid for them….
For me, clearly, the dumbest is the insurance study. Seriously, the clinical ones can be surprising at times, like if the study found some incidental findings we never knew. Regarding the health records, I doubt that patients know that why the clinician is NOT looking at them and only looking at the computer is EHRs. What they think is that people are rude or don’t care. They have to be told about the story which is plausible.
The insurance coverage wins!
Dave
Medicaid is not insurance. It’s an entitlement funded by taxpayers/
Gotta love the EHR. Drove me out of patient care six years ago.
I’ve got to go with EHR, too. BMI has something to do with health, indeed. Insurance, perhaps tangentially. But the EHR really is the Fourth Utensil at the Dinner Table. What in the hell is this needed for, we ask, when a simple knife, fork and spoon suffice?
Yes indeed, for 150 years, we have had the spork. But for 149 years, we’ve asked – what is THIS for?
Neither spork nor EMR are useful for anything. Both derived their origins to the concept “I have a clever idea to make something,” the drive for the creation of art. And, sadly, most works of art are awful, abysmal.
Think of the EMR as the equivalent of hideous postmodernist art like Louise Nevelson’s benighted Transparent Horizon which is whimsically vandalized by MIT students to mock its industrial brutality of composition. Perhaps we should tie yellow ribbons around the old EMR in protest.
#3, I learned that in medical school, oh about 30 years ago.
What’s idiotic about #2 is that it’s obviously bad and yet we’re still doing it
Got to give the vote to #2, EHRs suck. Doctors want to pay attention to patients, which is also what patients desire. Only proponents of EMR at this time is the medical axis of evil plus CMS which has found a way to effectively ration medicine. Docs have do busy work instead of seeing patients.
What frightening about the medicaid story is that 54% of Louisiana kids are now on medicaid.
Yikes !
I love these f’ing studies about EHR… always alluding to some great “benefits”, but never backing that up with a real study.
Just like an article in JAMA or NEJM recently touted the wondrous reduction in hyper (or hypo) glycemia in hospitalized patients at UCSF thanks be to EHR and endocrine review of charts. REALLY? All of this bullshit of EHR for something that could be accomplished by an admission registry and standing orders protocol? SMDH…