This past week, my veterinarian sister suddenly collapsed. She had a cardiac arrest while driving. Her passenger was able to get the car off the road with no crashes or injuries. A few cars back, a National Park Ranger (our area is full of Civil War Battlefields) came to her rescue. He had an AED…
I was listening to NPR on my drive home from work. The story of the hour was dedicated to a hospital suing lots of patients for unpaid medical bills. This particular hospital happens to be the dominant player in our region. In fact, it’s the hospital I’ve worked with for more than 25 years! There is a lot…
There is an animation site called “The 11 Second Club”. Every month, it posts 11 seconds of audio and a competition begins to create 11 seconds of animation to match the audio. A while back, the competition used 11 seconds from the 1989 movie “Parenthood” with Steve Martin and Jason Robards. It contains an interesting…
Medicare wants…. demands… you communicate with your geriatric population through a “patient computer portal.” Sometimes, when elderly patients fret about losing their ability to drive, I mention the marvelous convenience of Uber. Then, they pull out their feature phone with its gigantic numbered buttons and I realize my mistake. The concept of giving raw medical…
The numbers in this cartoon are not exaggerated. Dr. Stuart’s recent column here inspired me. Hospitals and clinics charge high prices for services. Medicare or insurance knock that down to a tiny fraction. Yet, the patient without insurance gets hammered the most. Also, if the particular medical center does not take your insurance, you are…
Drug prices are insane. Drug Copays are going up fast. Increasingly, drug coverage insurance is pushing more drug costs onto the patients. This quickly becomes a problem. The result: Even when patients have health insurance, huge copays may place necessary drugs out of reach. Pharmaceutical companies will respond in several ways to this criticism: Copay…
Who remembers when you used to do a thoracentesis at the bedside? Nobody used ultrasound guidance! We did physical exam in those days and then we checked a chest xray afterwards to make sure we hadn’t caused a pneumothorax. Get our awesome newsletter by signing up here. We don’t give your email out and we…
Medicare wants doctors to get patients on their computers. Doctors are required to set up computer portals to communicate with patients. These portals use two factor identification and presume substantial computer literacy from patients in their late 70s or 80s. Yet, there are limits. For many geriatric patients, a cell phone means a feature phone with gigantic numbers. If…
Right on the money. Get our awesome newsletter by signing up here. We don’t give your email out and we don’t spam you. Tweet