New York City’s Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC), which runs 11 hospitals in four of the five boroughs of New York, is negotiating a new deal with the union representing some 3,300 salaried physicians. The corporation...
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Patient satisfaction surveys are theoretically good things. After all, hospitals and doctors...
Read MoreEven in the day of the Information Superhighway, patients take the wrong exit to Misinformation Ave. Protoscience, pseudoscience, anti-science, spiritualism, mysticism and plain falsehoods flood some minds at the speed of...
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Even when generic drugs are available, approximately 4 of 10 physicians in practice more than 30...
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Several weeks ago, Primary Care Progress asked me to serve as one of their guest bloggers for this...
Read MorePatient satisfaction surveys are flawed in many ways. Here are just a few: 1. Sampling is a huge problem. A description of why sampling is an issue can be found here. It’s a bit complex. To summarize, the validity of a survey is...
Read MoreA recent survey published in Health Affairs found that 20% of nearly 2,000 physician respondents said that “they had not fully disclosed mistakes to patients for fear of being sued” in the past year. When I first heard about...
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Medscape’s 2012 Ethics Report surveyed over 24,000 US physicians across 25 specialties about their...
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An exploration of the top 100 websites from searches of “scoliosis” using the five most commonly...
Read MoreNot long ago, I blogged about a plastic surgeon who aggressively pursues patients who refuse to pay her bills. The state is suing her to make her stop and also considering lifting her medical license. You may want to take a look...
Read MoreInvestigators in Connecticut have found that patient perceptions of communication with ED medical teams appear to be positive. Results indicate that patients perceived ED teams to be respectful and willing to listen. “Excellent”...
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Physician empathy appears to be significantly associated with clinical outcomes in patients with...
Read MoreA report from the Institute of Medicine, available at www.iom.edu, identifies several tools that should reduce complexity of care as well as costs for the nation’s healthcare system. The report discusses computing power,...
Read MoreIt happened again. I was talking to a particularly sick patient recently who related another bad experience with a specialist. “He came in and started spouting that he was busy saving someone’s life in the ER, and then he didn’t...
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A recent survey from the Physician’s Foundation revealed a snapshot of what physicians are...
Read MoreEducation and training matter when it comes to who provides healthcare, but do most patients know the qualifications of their healthcare provider? A dozen states have now implemented laws that require healthcare providers to be...
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I love the GPS analogy for healthcare. Patients need a GPS for their health, showing them the...
Read MoreThe presence of urinary tract infections and surgical site infections appears to be significantly associated with patient-to-nurse ratios, according to a study from Rutgers University. Hospitals that reduced burnout by 30% had...
Read MoreIntimate partner violence (IPV) occurs in an estimated 2 million women in the United States each year and in up to 26% of American women over the course of their lifetime. IPV involves any pattern of assaultive and coercive...
Read MoreUniversity of Connecticut investigators have found that financial reinforcement interventions appear to significantly improve medication adherence. Interventions that were longer in duration, offered an average of $50 or more...
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