Category: Here’s What Primary Care Doctors Do All Day

JGrimes
On average, doctors handled 23.7 phone calls a day.
Read more this great post here

noreply@blogger.com (RCoffield@fsblaw.com)
The health-care bills passed by both the House and the Senate would both expand Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor. One important difference between the bills: The House version would significantly boost Medicaid payments to primary-care docs, while the Senate bill would not.
This difference — highlighted in this New Republic […]

noreply@blogger.com (RCoffield@fsblaw.com)
About 3,000 Medicare patients who’ve been getting care at a Mayo Clinic facility in Arizona will have to pay out of their own pocket or find another doctor.
Starting in 2010 (i.e., next week), the five primary care docs at a Mayo outpost in Glendale, Ariz. will stop accepting Medicare. Patients in the […]

JGrimes
Lots of health wonks and public officials say we need to pay for health care based on quality rather than volume. But that’s a tricky proposition.
Even if you can figure out what to measure, and how to account for differences between patient populations, you still need to have a decent sample size; anybody […]

JGrimes
With the medical establishment warning of a looming shortage of primary-care docs and general surgeons, Sen. Chuck Schumer is getting ready to introduce an amendment to the Senate health-care bill that would add 2,000 new medical residency slots, the WSJ reports this morning. But adding residency slots may not be enough to guarantee […]

JGrimes
The standard narrative of contemporary medicine tells us that doctor visits with patients are getting shorter and shorter, as docs struggle with rising overhead and pressure to be more efficient.
But as it turns out, the amount of time primary-care docs spend with each patient actually increased a little bit between 1997 and 2005, […]

JGrimes
Yes, the big health-care bills moving through Congress include a few measures to increase the number of primary-care doctors. No, those measures probably aren’t enough to satisfy the demand for primary-care projected by medical educators and others, Kaiser Health News reports
Medicare payments to primary-care docs would be boosted by 10% under the the […]

JGrimes
What shortage of primary care physicians? Miami has plenty of primary care docs who have defected from Cuba, according to the New York Times, which estimates that 6,000 medical professionals have left Cuba in the last six years.
More generally, foreign-trained physicians have been filling the shortage of primary care physicians in the U.S. […]

JGrimes
Tucked into the depths of the 1,018 pages of the House health care bill is $125 million to fund a program that looks at the medical home.
In a medical home, a primary care provider (such as a family doctor, internist, pediatrician or nurse practitioner) gets paid to serve as the main point of […]

JGrimes
Surgeon general is a largely symbolic post — potentially useful as a bully pulpit, but without a lot of administrative authority. So it makes sense to look for the symbolic implications of Barack Obama’s choice of Regina Benjamin as surgeon general. They aren’t hard to find.
Regina Benjamin is a family doctor who runs […]