QD: News Every Day

ACP Internist begins a daily digest of primary care in the news, debuting with an update on health care reform's messy reconciliation in Congress, good news about Medicare access (as health care currently stands) and what a national EHR network would look like.

Most recently for health care reform:
Two Democratic proposals to create a government insurance plan to compete with private insurers failed, while members of Congress turn their attention toward paying for abortion and insurance coverage for illegal immigrants. Now, Sen. Max Baucus is looking to revise a key financing provision after an analysis showed its tax burden would fall on seniors. In the wake of voting, amendments, provisions and alternatives are being slung left and right (politically, as well as figuratively.)

Since it's not a news cycle without something on H1N1, hundreds of New York state's health care workers protested a mandate that medical professionals get seasonal and swine-flu vaccines. But state health commissioner Richard F. Daines, FACP, told Gannett News Service, "This isn't the time to pump air into a completely deflated argument about vaccine safety."

Other issues internists should also be aware of include:
The Government Accountability Office found that less than 3% of Medicare beneficiaries had major problems accessing physician services, even while more people used the benefit and the number of services per beneficiary increased. More physicians are accepting Medicare, too. Unfortunately for Medicaid, it's far too easy to fraudulently access addictive drugs--65,000 instances costing of about $65 million in 2006 and 2007.

Finally, doctors' offices and hospitals are slowly, slowly moving toward electronic health records. Another view on the issue is instead of one national database, there'd be a "network of networks."

Labels: electronic health records, electronic medical records, emr, H1N1, health care reform, medicare, QD

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posted by Ryan DuBosar at 1:06 PM   1 Comments

When patients control their own records

Steve Spadt, ACP's Director of Interactive Product Development for projects such as the College's Diabetes Portal and the MKSAP product line, delivers a round-up of the latest in electronic health records, including patients taking control of their own health records and Web communities that let patients connect with other patients with similar symptoms and diseases, and possibly by-pass medical providers.

Learn more about the latest in medical informatics from the American Medical Informatics Association's annual meeting in Washington, DC.

Patient Health Records (PHRs) continue to gain steam, though there is a key differentiator which is whether or not the system is "tethered," meaning connected to or integrated with a full Electronic Health Record (EHR) or other clinician-managed systems. Medical informatics experts almost universally share the belief that untethered PHRs (systems that operate independently and contain data that is managed solely by patients) may actually negatively impact care as they could strain patient/clinician relationships as clinicians struggle to coordinate the data in their own systems with that in the patient's PHR--an effort that would further burden an already critically low level of time and resources available per patient encounter. AMIA'S journal recently addressed this topic.

Kevin, MD piece on EMRs

Kevin, MD has a nice, succinct opinion piece in USA Today about why doctors resist using electronic medical records. He is also now a member of the newspaper's board of contributors, so you'll be seeing his opinions on medical issues every few months.

USA Today has the highest circulation of any newspaper in the nation, so if you want a shot at getting the word out to the general public about something, email your ideas to Kevin.

Labels: electronic medical records, emr, kevin md

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posted by Jessica Berthold at 10:55 AM   0 Comments