The Doctor Is In

A discussion of the difference between grace and Karma, riffing off a quote from U2′s Bono.

Damn!, I hate these calls… Lying on my desk, clipped to a yellow manila binder, is a single sheet of paper. Its pleasant color format and sampled photomicrograph belie the gravity of its content: Adenocarcinoma, Gleason grade 9, involving 60% of the specimen. How do you deliver a death sentence? Your first impression of Charlie [...]

On a previous post on transparency in health care, a commenter (Carol) asks the following excellent question: You might offer your thoughts regarding conventional medicine’s penchant to treat symptoms rather than heal the underlying problem. Is this a manifestation of the restrictive insurance company protocols? Is it the way medical schools train physicians to think? [...]

Cleaning out your garage is not exactly my idea of a great way to spend the weekend. But, every now and then, you find some little treasure that makes it all worthwhile. Such was my good fortune last month. Amidst the boxes filled with old check registers, broken parts from kids’ bikes, and other largely [...]

Several months ago, I upgraded my voice recognition software to Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 8. I have been using voice recognition software for over five years now, and have been very satisfied with it, although older versions could be maddening at times–and hilarious at others. This version is amazingly accurate–my only complaint since upgrading is that [...]

This is the third post of a series on issues related to improving quality in medicine (so why is it named “Part 2″? Don’t ask… ). The two previous posts addressed a new proposal for reimbursement called pay-for-performance: Pray for Performance Quality in Medicine – Pt I Last year, my trusty 1995 Acura Legend began [...]

A commenter on my previous post on pay-for-performance asked an excellent question: So, if it were your job to implement a “quality assurance” system in health care (or specifically in your part of the health care system), where would you start? Whining is easy in medicine — as in most areas of life — and [...]

There has been growing interest in a significant change in payment methodology in health care, one called pay for performance. It’s a simple and alluring concept: physicians and other health care organizations will be paid better when their care meets or exceeds certain as-yet-unspecified quality indicators. The medical blogs, such as Medpundit, DB’s Medical Rants, [...]