The federal stimulus package has put a lot of money on the table to encourage doctors to embrace electronic medical records – as much as $44,000 per practice. But new and more restrictive security regulations could be a major buzz-kill.
While it’s hardly a boom time, primary care groups showed slight to significant gains in total revenue during the first year of the recession, while most specialist groups showed losses.
Doctors may not exactly love Medicare, but a new survey shows they prefer it to the big private insurance plans when it comes to matters like payer communications, contract negotiation, payment processing, and overall satisfaction.
For too many physicians, primary care practice feels like a shoe that just doesn’t fit. Like bewitched sisters in the children’s story, Cinderella, they’re cutting off parts of their feet in order to fit the shoes they believe they must wear.
The nation’s big corporations are going to great lengths to get employees to exercise, lose weight, eat better and quit smoking. But all-too-often these corporate wellness programs don’t engage employees’ physicians.
In this first of an ongoing series of articles offering medicolegal guidance for holistic/integrative practitioners, legal expert Alan Dumoff provides insight into the value of informed consent, and provides guidelines for drafting effective and protective informed consent forms.
The specific treatment a doctor gives is only a small part of the total clinical experience. The key to creating an effective healing experience is to create a vision that reaches below the surface of conscious awareness, where 95% of what we take in is processed. To give patients a nurturing, healing experience, we need to create nurturing, compassionate, empowering input that touches people on many different levels.
Revolution and reform were major themes at the Institute of Medicine’s historic Summit on Integrative Medicine and the Public Health. But it’s another “R” word reimbursement that will determine what a reformed, integrated system will really deliver. IOM delegates called for a radical shift toward prevention and “wellness” but no one is sure how that transformation will be financed.
Health policy experts are concerned that health care reform efforts could be stymied by a severe lack of primary care doctors. The problem could be attenuated if those presiding over reform would allow the thousands of licensed or license-eligible naturopaths and other holistic non-MD practitioners help to shape and then participate in a reformed health care system.
A growing number of primary care doctors are discovering that clinic-based exercise centers are a good “fit” for their patients’ physical health, and for their own fiscal health. A turnkey model called Integrative Health Network (iH3) is enabling more doctors to bring exercise medicine into their practices and to people who might never set foot in a commercial fitness club.
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