The American Board of Family Medicine Gets a $439,000 Grant from the Government
Here is an interesting story that will make you tingle inside. Under a three-year agreement, the ABFM (American Board of Family Medicine) will develop measures to track health IT use and interoperability of different EHRs. They will also “collect nationwide data and work with ONC to interpret the results, and inform future regulations. HHS is paying ABFM just over $439,000 under the agreement.”
Like they need more money?
Remember, the ABFM was supposed to be an organization just to administer the boards to family doctors. Not anymore. They want power. And they have your data and money (from the useless MOC exams) to do whatever they want.
I love this quote from the piece:
The program, which will be run by the nonprofit medical group American Board of Family Medicine, will focus on software interoperability and burden on providers to inform future rulemaking.
Nonprofit? My ass they are.
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Interoperability? Are you kidding? That will NEVER happen in your lifetime. If Obama had come up with a “Manhattan Project” endeavor that would have made an EHR system the majority of physicians happy and made our jobs easier then maybe. Especially if it were provided for free. Likely would have taken 5 to 10 years to do so but more than likely 10 years.
Instead a bunch software companies jumped in with a bunch of b#ll$h!t that did one thing: Increase the cost of providing care! Oh and do they give us the software for free? F#c% no! Gotta pay yearly maintenance fees in order to use it! Guess who ends up paying in the end? You guess right, the patients. I remember when I was a resident an office visit was $17.00 in 1985. Attending Docs it wasn’t much higher. Now what is it? $155.00 or so for a regular call.
It boils down to all this money spent on EHR is akin to burning it up in a giant bonfire as it really hasn’t done one thing to approve the overall healthcare in this country. Nothing will improve it until patients are held accountable for their lousy health behaviors.
Oh, I really like the “Related Posts” section above to be able to review and fume over. Good that Doug locked them otherwise it could induce new invective in light current state of events.
Ahhhh, “approve” should be improve up there. Sorry. Gotta do better proof reading before hitting send.
I think the issue of EMR interoperability is very important, but don’t see the ABFM doing much with this. My guess is they will send out some surveys which ultimately won’t change anything, which is what they’ve already been doing. How many times are they going to ask me what EMR I’m using, if I like it and if I’m thinking of switching.
Here’s a swifty I suggest for the ASFM to write to us toilers:
“At no time and in no circumstances should a member of the ABFM place his personal interests first; he should subordinate to the interests of the nation and the patient. Hence selfishness, slacking, corruption, seeking the limelight are most contemptible, while … working with all one’s energy, whole-hearted devotion to public duty, and quiet hard work will command respect. Hence, member physicians are expected to work diligently and thoughtfully in order to ensure he or she provides the most benefit to society. As a result, for example, any physician in the medical IT field is expected to revolutionize medicine without the wish for acknowledgment or excessive monetary reward. “ Ooooh – you’d have to quote Mao Tse-Tung or get spanked for plagiarism if the
PartyASFM doesn’t quote the chairman.Let’s try another one…
Thanks, Dr. Kollontai; but she’s really not a doctor, she wrote this a hundred years ago in 1920, in response to the bureaucratic throttling of the Soviet Union itself. Young physicians, google the Soviet Union. It died from the same disease that all these Boards are dying of – achieving importance without advancing skill in the practice of medicine, and soaking the sucker out in the field actually doing the job.
“in all transitional societies working toward Communism, work ethic and motivation appear to be extremely lacking even though everyone is assigned some task or job. For example, in a study conducted in the former USSR, over 50% of the work force admitted to drinking alcohol while on the job. Furthermore, unbeknownst to the communist party, nearly 40% chose to work a second job privately to attain more wealth” (Communism and Computer Ethics, Stanford) OK, we can stamp out moonlighting. In another 5-10 years, expect everyone in the clinic to be buzzin’ and jammin’ on something as clinical work gets turned into assembly line work.
Instead of “trying to wipe out individuality, 21st Century medicine must develop the practitioner’s “inclinations and aptitudes in conformity with its interests, furnish them with suitable work and working conditions and commend and reward them.” with P4P. 10-4, we be there, Stanford. [Above quote semi-abstracted from Liu Shaoqi, How to Be a Good Communist]
The Bureaucratic Enemy, the Iron Cage, is one of the Seven Deadly Sins of modernism. Everybody in power tries a white line of it, gets a rush, snorts some more, and down the rabbit hole we go, ASFM or Red Army.
Once the medical/business organism sets its tentacles in the host, they are there until the death of the host, all the while digging in deeper and deeper and deeper.