ACO

Overcoming Shame

10 Comments / Improving Health Care, Patient Empowerment

This insecurity is the biggest challenge in my practice: getting people to change their behavior.  Somehow I have to somehow get people to pay attention to their health when they\’d rather ignore it, to be taking medications when they\’d rather not, to be exercising when they don\’t want to, to lose weight when they love cheeseburgers, and to be checking their blood sugars when they\’d rather not know how high they are.  After trying lots of things over the past 20+ years, the one thing I find almost never works is what is usually done: lecturing the patient.

Dear ACO General Hospital

1 Comment / Health Care - How it's Broken

Thanks for contacting me about my most recent blog post.  I\’m sorry to scare your administration about HIPAA information, but I am equally concerned about that and will always do my best to respect the privacy of my patients.  At your request I hid even more of that information.

Computerized Epic Failure

13 Comments / EMR, Health Care - How it's Broken

Good news: my local hospital has the fanciest, newest, coolest computer system (costing major bucks, of course) and now is routinely sending me \”transition of care\” documents on my patients.

Bad news: they are horrible.

Seriously, we get several of these documents per day and often can\’t figure out what the document is about.  On the bright side, sometimes after taking 10-20 minutes of looking through the 12-14 page document, we do actually gain some useful information.