Tag: primary care

Finding a Good Doctor – A Doctor’s Notes

Jun 7, 2012• 2

By ROB LAMBERTS, MD

My in-laws are in town for my daughter’s graduation.

When I came home yesterday I was greeted with a big smile and vigorous handshake from my father-in-law. ”I just want to thank you,” he said, standing up from his chair, “for finding us a good doctor. The one you found for us is wonderful.”

My wife smiled at me warmly. I just earned myself big points. Yay!

Her parents and mine are both in their 80′s and are overall in remarkably good health. When I called my father after he had a minor surgery over the summer, my mother told me he had a ladder and was “on a bee hunt.” It’s a blessing to have them around, especially having them healthy.

My parents have a wonderful primary care physician, which takes a whole lot of pressure off of me to do family doctoring, and puts my mind at ease. I’ve only personally contacted him once when my dad had a prolonged time of vague fatigue and body aches. I try not to use the “I’m a doctor, so I am second-guessing you” card that I’ve had some patients’ children pull. I called his doctor more as a son who wanted a clear story about what was going on than as a physician with thoughts on the situation.

“I first want to say that I am very grateful my parents have gotten such good care from you,” I said at the start of the conversation. ”It’s nice to not have to wonder if they are getting good care.”Continue reading…

Shame

May 16, 2012• 39

By Rob Lamberts, MD

I saw a gentleman in my office recently. He was having severe pain radiating from his lower back, down to his calf.

I was about to describe my plan to him when he interrupted me saying, “I know, Doc, I am overweight. I know that this would just get better if I lost the weight.” He hung his head down as he spoke and fought off tears.

He was clearly morbidly obese, so in one sense he was right on; his health would be much better if he would lose the pounds. On the other hand, I don’t know of any studies that say obesity is a risk factor to ruptured vertebral discs. Besides, he was in significant pain, and a lecture about his weight was not in my agenda. I wanted to make sure he did not need surgery, and make him stop hurting.

This whole episode really bothered me. He was so used to being lectured about his obesity that he wanted to get to the guilt trip before I brought it to him. He was living in shame. Everything was due to his obesity, and his obesity was due to his lack of self-control and poor character. After all, losing weight is as simple as exercise and dietary restraint, right?

Perhaps I am too easy on people, but I don’t like to lecture people on things they already know. I don’t like to say the obvious: “You need to lose weight.” Obese people are rarely under the impression that it is perfectly fine that they are overweight. They rarely are surprised to hear a person saying that their weight is at the root of many of their problems. Obese people are the new pariahs in our culture; it used to be smokers, but now it is the overweight.

Medicaid-driven Budget Crisis Needs a Marcus Welby/Steve Jobs Solution

Apr 18, 2012• 20

By Dave Chase

Not a week goes by without seeing some headline about deficits pushing municipalities to desperation or Bill Gates describing state budgets using accounting techniques that would make Enron blush. The common culprit: healthcare costs with Medicaid being the biggest driver.

Recently Carly Fiorina opined on The Health Care Blog about Health Care, Not Coverage. She pointed out the unnecessary administrative burden that could be better spent on delivering healthcare. Fortunately, there is already a proven model, developed and run by physicians, that has shown it can reduce costs 20-40% by removing administrative overhead while improving outcomes (e.g., 40-80% reductions in hospital admissions) and greatly increasing patient satisfaction with Google/Apple level of patient satisfaction.

It can be described as two parts Marcus Welby and one part Steve Jobs. The federal health reform bill included a little-noticed clause allowing for Direct Primary Care (DPC) models to be a part of the state health insurance exchanges. That little-noticed clause (Section 1301 (a)(3) of the Affordable Care Act and proposed HR3315 to expand DPC to Medicare recipients) should have the effect of massively spreading the DPC model throughout the country. In California, the DPC model was introduced in a bill to bring explicit support for the DPC model as has been done in the state of Washington and elsewhere.

Why Are Primary Docs Thinking About Leaving Medicine?

Mar 22, 2012• 50

By Aaron Carroll, MD

As you can imagine, I spend a lot of time with physicians. As a group, they sure do like to complain. Yet, medical school applications are strong, and residency spots are still competitive. So I take cries of “they’re all going to quit” with a grain of salt.

That said, I also like data. So it’s worth checking in every once in a while to see what physicians, as a group, are thinking. There’s a study in the Journal of Primary Care and Community Health that does just that:

The status of the primary care workforce is a major health policy concern. It is affected not only by the specialty choices of young physicians but also by decisions of physicians to leave their practices. This study examines factors that may contribute to such decisions. We analyzed data from a 2009 Commonwealth Fund mail survey of American physicians in internal medicine, family or general practice, or pediatrics to examine characteristics associated with their plans to retire or leave their practice for other reasons in the next 5 years.

What did they find? More than half of physicians age 50 and over had plans to leave their practice in the next 5 years, or weren’t sure about staying in practice. No physicians age 35-49 had plans to retire, but 20% weren’t sure they’d stay in practice. I take such numbers with a grain of salt, though. That’s partly because, as I said above, doctors like to complain. That’s also because saying what you are going to do in the future is not the same as what you will actually do. In case people hadn’t noticed, the job market isn’t too awesome out there. I think many physicians are delusional if they think they can just quit practicing medicine and find another lucrative job.

But I think that the reasons that primary care docs say they might quit are illuminating. Those reasons are likely the things that make them unhappy about practicing, and we can definitely learn from that.

Patient Rights

Mar 10, 2012• 5

By Rob Lamberts

I was talking to a patient a few days ago who was raving about a local grocery store.

”They get it,” she said. ”They understand how to take care of their customers.”

It made me think about how far medicine has drifted away from the same idea. Ironically, despite the fact that our “customers” (people who pay us for our services) are seeking us so we can “take care of” them, we do a lousy job of taking care of our customers. It has been an obsession of mine since I started practice, but it has been something that has been increasingly difficult to accomplish. I now have to fight against the need to meet “meaningful use” criteria so that I can have time to make the record meaningful and useful to my patients. I have to fight against the need to conform to “medical home,” criteria so that I can make my practice the place my patients see as their ultimate medical haven.

The more the government and insurance industries push me toward focusing on my patients, the less time I have for my patients because of the need to meet criteria proving that I am caring for my patients. It’s a mess.

So I went back to my roots. What do I really think should be the rights of my patients? Here is a list that I made:

Patients have the following rights:

The right to have access to care when it’s needed
This does not mean the care is done in the office either. It can be done over the phone or via computer.
The schedule of the office should accommodate the patients’ needs as much as is reasonable to expect.
The right to have care that is convenient
They should not have to wait to be seen or wait on the phone to be heard

Buckle Up

Mar 3, 2012• 6

By ROB LAMBERTS, MD

Rob Lamberts, MD Lipitor can destroy your liver.

Back surgery can leave you paralyzed.

People who take Chantix might kill themselves.

You may never wake up from a simple surgery.

These statements are all true. They also are very confusing to many of my patients when I am prescribing drugs or recommending surgery. What should they do when they hear such bad things about drugs, surgeries, or procedures? How much do they risk when they follow my advice?

It’s a hard world out there, with the attorneys advertising on TV about drugs my patients have taken, with the websites devoted to the harms brought on by a drug or an immunization, with Dr. Oz and other seemingly smart people telling them things that are contrary to my advice, and with friends and neighbors who give dire warnings about the dangers of following my advice.

There are so many voices out there competing with mine, that I sometimes spend more time reassuring than I do anything else. A doctor in our practice believes that Dr. Oz ought to issue a statement to doctors whenever he voices another controversial opinion as gospel fact so that we can be ready with our counter-arguments.

What can doctors do? We can’t quiet the other voices that speak against us. In truth, those voices have an important role in preventing us from becoming comfortable and dogmatic in our beliefs. So how do I combat such a heavy current against our advice?

By talking about seat belts.

Seat belts can kill you, you know. You can be trapped inside your car by your seat belt and not be able to get out before your car explodes. It’s not a fable; it can really happen.

You may be sealing your fate to die terribly every time you buckle your seat belt.

Should Your Doctor Talk with You About the Cost of Your Pills?

Feb 15, 2012• 9

By Peter Ubel, MD

I first realized something was amiss when I picked up my prescriptions and the pharmacist explained that she could not fill the anti-malarial medications as prescribed: “Your medication plan only pays for 30 days of pills, and your prescription was for five pills.” The pharmacist continued: “Your PBM [that’s an acronym for pharmacy benefits management company, the type of company that coordinates many peoples’ medication coverage] only fills this medication for 30 days at a time. And 5 pills would last 35 days.”

Expert logician that I am, I countered with some math of my own: “Well four pills, taken weekly, only lasts 28 days. If they really want to give me 30 days of coverage, they need to give me a fifth pill.” I thought it was insane to pay a whole extra co-pay to get my fifth and last pill, a co-pay I’d have to pay for my two sons too since all three of us were traveling together.

But the pharmacist was unpersuaded: “Sorry, four pills is it. You’ll need another prescription for the last pill.”

Irked, I handed over my credit card and hastily signed the bill, too bothered by the conversation to look closely at the bottom line.

When I got home and told my wife Paula about the saga of the fifth pill, she calmly looked at the bill and asked me: “If you were so concerned about a $10 co-pay, why didn’t you notice that the antibiotic you were given cost almost $200?”

Huh?

The X Questions

Jan 31, 2012• 44

By Joe Flower

Ten existential questions will make the difference between stumbling into the future and thriving

The questions have changed. The key strategy questions that the C-suite must be asking—and getting answers to—are different now than they were in the past, even from what they were last year. Most of today’s health care CEOs and C-suite leaders are missing many of the key questions they need to ask to drive strategy now, this year, this budget, in order to survive the next three to seven years. Which ones are you missing?

A New Mind-set

Today and for the next few years the weather of this industry will be dominated by pervasive, discontinuous change. Structures, revenue streams, relationships of every level: All are shifting in fundamental ways. Specifically, the weather will be driven by:

invention and propagation of new business models;
shifting risk onto both the provider and the patient, accompanied by building of new risk-based relationships, contracts and alliances;
smart primary care coming to the fore as the foundation of health care, driving most business models;
digitization and automation going wall to wall and beyond the walls—accompanied by powerful new info-capacities, from “big data” strategic analysis to new ways of reaching and bonding with customers; and
a striking new need for efficiency and effectiveness in response to rapidly rising demand as the baby boom ages, the baby boom health care workforce ages and disengages, and the newly insured increase their use of health care facilities.

Most of these factors, except the very last, are not dependent on the health care reform act, and will not change much if the act is altered or set aside.Continue reading…

Now you have healthcare data. So where does it go?

Jan 27, 2012• 4

By Paul Grundy, MD

In the next 10 years, data and the ability to analyze the data will do for the doctor’s mind what x-ray and medical imaging have done for their vision. How? By turning data into actionable information.

For instance, take Watson, IBM’s intelligent supercomputer. Watson can analyze the meaning and context of human language, and quickly process vast amounts of information. With this information, it can suggest options targeted to a patient’s circumstances. This is an example of technology that can help physicians and nurses identify the most effective courses of treatment for their patients. And fast: in less than 3 seconds Watson can sift through the equivalent of about 200 million pages, evaluate the information, and provide precise responses. With medical information doubling every 5 years, advanced health analytic systems technologies can help improve patient care through the delivery of up- to-date, evidence-based health care.

The Awkward World of Private Insurance in the UK

Jan 16, 2012• 10

By Bob Wachter, MD

I remember reading an article that observed that systems of universal insurance – which need to put their energy into providing a “decent minimum” for the masses – must also offer a “safety valve for the wealthy disaffected.” Canada bans private insurance for basic hospital and medical care services. So, when affluent Canadians want “the best,” some of them pop across the border to Cleveland or Ann Arbor.

But from the time of its founding in 1948, the British National Health Service has allowed – and, depending on which party is in power, promoted – a private insurance market. Private insurance in a single payer, government run healthcare system is a funny animal: one part incest, one part conflict of interest, and three parts strange bedfellows. And it’s infinitely fascinating. Here’s how it works:

The insurance part isn’t too difficult to understand. People living in Britain can obtain private insurance, and about 10 percent of them do. About one-third of people with private insurance purchase it with their own money, while the rest receive it as a benefit of employment. Many of the big multinationals provide such insurance, either to all their employees or to senior executives. It’s considered a plum perk for everyone, and most expats coming to work in the UK consider it an essential benefit.