<p>[Some Obamacare Enrollees Emboldened To Leave Jobs, Start Businesses]( <a href=“Health Insurance Center: Your Guide to the Affordable Care Act”>Health Insurance Center: Your Guide to the Affordable Care Act)</p>
<p>One of the many problems with our previous system was that people were stuck in jobs they didn’t want, purely for the insurance. Now those people are free to follow their dreams of early retirement or starting a business.</p>
<p>I was extremely surprised to see that my son’s orthopedic surgeon has written an editorial for the Wall Street Journal regarding the interference of govt bureaucrats in the doctor-patient relationship. My son played football in high school and this guy was amazing. I will never forget when he put back in place his dislocated elbow after he was injured. He designed a special cast for him so he could continue to play that season. Dr. Craviotto has indicated that he has received an outpouring of support from doctors all over the country.</p>
<p><a href=“Daniel F. Craviotto: A Doctor's Declaration of Independence - WSJ”>http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304279904579518273176775310</a></p>
<p>You may have to google the article.</p>
<p>In case you need to Google, GP’s linked op-ed is in the Wall Street Journal, and it is entitled “A Doctor’s Declaration of Independence,” by DANIEL F. CRAVIOTTO JR.</p>
<p>I’m glad Dr. Craviotto helped GP’s son, and I’m sure he’s good at orthopedics. But what a whiner! What the heck is this resistance to electronic medical records about? This is just dopey Luddite-ism. Paper records may be convenient for doctors, but they are terrible for everyone else. I’m sick of older doctors complaining that they are too good to touch a keypad. And it’s always the old doctors. Younger doctors are like, what, what do you mean I’m supposed to write this down on paper, how do I do a search if I write it down on paper? This dude says he spends hours every day documenting what he did to his patients. Welcome to the modern world, guy. How else are the other doctors, and the patient, supposed to know what you did if you don’t document it? </p>
<p>And then this guy has the nerve to complain about compensation. This poor fellow, what a tragedy, orthopedists’ incomes have gone up only a miniscule 27% from 2011. Where is the world’s tiniest violin?</p>
<p>Plus this, from Dr. I-Have-Never-Heard-Of-A-Teacher:
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<p>He advises other doctors to stop taking Medicare. Doctors are always saying that, and never doing it. I’m not expecting a long line of other orthopedic surgeons to take that advice. What, are they going to do hip replacements and knee replacements on 29-year-olds? I didn’t think so. </p>
<p>And the best part is, he threatens to retire-- ten years from now, when he is 68. Oh noes.</p>
<p>What an unattractive temper tantrum.</p>
<p>Let’s see…whom do I trust to know more about the doctor-patient relationship: CF or Dr Craviotto who has been practicing medicine for 30 years and I happen to know is an excellent physician. Not a tough answer.</p>
<p>We’re training med students on EMR and they don’t even realize they can expand the screens. Otoh, a growing number of med schools are now using mostly online books, which has mostly been a smooth transition. Much of their training includes electronic interaction with profs and mentors. One of the points of electronic records is their fast transfer to a hosp or other doc. The info is organized per the same categories of info the doc seeks from you (or is supposed to) and needs to track. Ever see manual records? They can be chaotic and illegible. Of course, a doc can mess up EMR, but that’s on him or her.</p>
<p>I was in an eye doc office the other day and as fast as I could ask if X was covered, the gal had already scanned my id card and knew the answer back from the insurer. Of course some practices will resist, sometimes forgetting everything is evolving around us. But btw, this traces back to the Bush administration, “which issued an executive order calling for a universal “interoperable health information” infrastructure and electronic health records for all Americans within 10 years.” That was in 2004. </p>
<p>He might have a good bedside manner to his patients, but he comes across as a jerk in his op-ed. I never, ever want to hear a doctor complaining about how much he makes again, or about terrible working conditions. Ever. It’s like doctors think they are the only people in the world who have student loans, the only people in the world who have to do paperwork, the only people in the world who have regulations and rules governing what they do at work.</p>
<p>I am also sick of doctors complaining about electronic medical records. What have they done about the problem, except drag their feet for twenty years while every other sector of the economy put their data in electronic form? Doctors should be ashamed they didn’t have electronic health records ten years ago. The doctors still using paper might as well be chiseling your records in cuneiform.</p>
<p>And… this was pointed out by Aaron Carroll on The Incidental Economist, and it’s true: This guy is complaining about not having any voice in the debate, while being published in one of the most-read op-ed pages in the country. Oh poor little him. World’s tiniest violin, stat.</p>
<p>Why doctors hate EHR software</p>
<p><a href=“Why Doctors Hate EHR Software”>Why Doctors Hate EHR Software;
<p><a href=“http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/820101”>EHR Rankings Hint at Physician Revolt;
<p><a href=“http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2012/02/emr-dirty-word-doctors.html”>http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2012/02/emr-dirty-word-doctors.html</a></p>
<p>There are a million other articles but I can only link so many.</p>
<p>CF, I think you may have forgotten your meds today.</p>
<p>He may have done well by Pooch jr, but still not be representative of the feelings about many new trends. This is the same narrow “me” view we’ve been railing against. Lost me when he wrote, “In addition to the burden of mandated electronic-record entry, doctors also face board recertification in the various medical specialties that has become time-consuming, expensive, imposing…”</p>
<p>The meds comment isn’t funny, especially considering you chose by headline again.
<a href=“NCHS - 404 Error - Resource Not Available”>NCHS - 404 Error - Resource Not Available;
There’s plenty of updated commentary. If you don’t realize that, it’s fruitless. </p>
<p>Let me make this clear: I want a doc who is cutting edge aware in many respects. Not Doc Quinn, Medicine Woman.</p>
<p>And…speaking of temper tantrums…</p>
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<p>Well, for once and easy problem to solve. Don’t go to doctors, don’t have doctors in your social circle and don’t read articles which are by, for or about doctors. There. And that solution is less than the cost of an office visit.</p>
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Emilybee has the market on violin links…please refer to previous posts. Be sure to listen with a headset…so as not to disturb others.</p>
<p>Geez…bad day???</p>
<p>Doctors have only themselves to blame if the EHR interfaces are crap (which they are). Doctors could have embraced the technology, set up reasonable interface and interoperability standards, worked with vendors to make good systems. Doctors and medical groups are the purchasers of this stuff. They could have worked with developers. They could have done that, but instead they dragged their feet and dragged their feet for decades, and now they are being dragged into the 21st century. If they didn’t want to be dragged, they should have led.</p>
<p>I was doing electronic banking in the 70s, for goodness sake. Isn’t forty years of electronic data manipulation long enough for doctors to come on board without being dragged?</p>
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<p>And yet, you can continue to go to the nice teller if you wish, and have them hand write your transaction slip. A function for which I am eternally grateful…thereby not having to force aging relatives, or those simply uncomfortable with the electronic version…to convert. </p>
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<p>But the teller, the one who is paid to do banking, as a doctor is paid to do doctoring, can’t decide not to use the bank’s computers to enter the transaction. I may be able to get a handwritten transaction slip (although come to think of it, handwritten? No, I can’t) but I can guarantee that the teller has to put hands on keyboards, or use some other method of data entry than writing in a ledger. A bank teller that complained about having to use electronic bank records would be a bank teller looking for a job.</p>
<p>Doctors are not the first people in history to have to use bad user interfaces.</p>
<p>Doctors have been participating in all this development, btw. At conferences and seminars, in their own offices, and sometimes, at the developers’ facilities. They read journals, get practice management (business) advice and talk to each other. If they don’t stay abreast, how do you think they learn? You’re picking this to worry about. </p>
<p>Doctoring, btw, includes not just good verbal communications and medical savvy, but also written comms. In this day and age, with all the potential, who says it has to be in pen? My Rx, btw, also are printed right from his laptop. Wireless. </p>
<p>My doctor’s group began migrating to EMR a number of years before ACA ever came along. This is nothing new.</p>
<p>My prescriptions go like this: </p>
<p>Them: “Your drugstore is still Happy Drugs on Sunshine Street, right?”
Me: “Yep.”
Them: “We’re prescribing WonderPill. Just take one, and you’ll forget all about the Sharks folding like a lawn chair and collapsing like an underdone souffle,”</p>
<p>And then I go to Happy Drugs, pick up my prescription and pay my co-pay. The medical group computer talks directly to the drugstore computer. </p>
<p>CF, when you have a heart attack or an urgent illness and you go to the ER, don’t get upset if you can’t be seen immediately because the doctor is doing EMR.
ER docs used to be able to see 3.5 patients in an hour and now it is 1.8 because of EMR. The patients suffer.</p>
<p>I personally don’t want my doctor spending a couple hours each day shuffling paperwork, much of it unnecessary busywork mandated by the govt. Oh yeah, the govt would never do that.</p>
<p>Cbreeze, doctors used to spend time charting before EMR came along too. Either they are recording more info now – a good thing IMO – or they are stumbling around with the new software because they haven’t been trained on it. Or they are practicing passive resistance. </p>
<p>Are you suggesting that the medical profession go back to all manual record keeping? And are you suggesting that ACA is somehow responsible for the digitalization of the modem world? </p>