A fight for the heart and soul of health care

Health care has undergone innumerable changes over the last decade, and the pace of change only appears to be accelerating. At the crux of most of the changes we’ve seen is the central problem that the cost of our health care system is unsustainable, and we as a nation need to put the brakes on it. The costs to individual patients are also unacceptably high. Unfortunately, the prevailing philosophy has been to increase regulations and add more layers of expensive bureaucracy and pile on more non-clinical administrators. No reasonable person would argue against a sector as large and vital as health care, not having a degree of oversight. But at the same time, if the aim was to curb spending — is there any evidence that what we’ve done is working? Statistics suggest that America’s physicians are facing an epidemic of burnout and job dissatisfaction. This has less to do with the nature of the job itself, but with the way, the practice of medicine has changed and become unrecognizable from what it once was. The need to follow regulations has heaped a massive amount of non-clinical duties onto physicians of all specialties. An ever-shrinking amount of time is spent with patients, and an ever-increasing amount spent staring at a computer screen — typing away furiously and clicking boxes to fulfill these regulatory requirements. Continue reading ... Your patients are rating you online: How to respond. Manage your online reputation: A social media guide. Find out how.
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - Category: General Medicine Authors: Tags: Physician Practice Management Public Health & Policy Source Type: blogs