When medical coders blame physicians

Physician
March 16, 2018

An interesting paper in CMAJ Open reports on a series of interviews with coders concerning their perceptions of their interactions with doctors. The study was done in Canada, but it rings true to what we experience in the U.S. The fundamental objective of coding is the same: to translate information about the patient’s story into a series of numeric ICD-10 codes for various administrative purposes. Several themes emerged from these interviews. Form …

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When medical coders blame physicians

What to do when a patient wants to leave the hospital against medical advice

Physician
February 5, 2018

There’s an interesting article in the Journal of Hospital Medicine on what to do when a patient wants to leave the hospital against medical advice. After reading and rereading it, I had to disagree with the conclusion, but it took me a bit to get there because the article, with its confusing use of terms, is a masterpiece of obfuscation. The most obvious example is the oxymoronic use of the term “AMA …

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What to do when a patient wants to leave the hospital against medical advice

Where has evidence based medicine taken us in 20 years?

Physician
June 3, 2013

A few months ago marked the 20th anniversary of the launch of evidence based medicine (EBM). Now seems a good time for a retrospective. After twenty years what does EBM mean? Where has it taken us? What are the distortions and unintended consequences? You might be surprised.

What I intend to do is start with a little of the history of EBM, talk about the essential notion as originally conceived by …

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Where has evidence based medicine taken us in 20 years?

Judging a guideline just by financial interest is intellectually lazy

Physician
October 27, 2011

Tom Sullivan, blogging over at Policy and Medicine, recently noticed another flurry of activity in the long running debate about conflicts of interest. His post is titled Coordinated Ad Hominem Attacks on Physician-Industry Relationships in Guideline Development: The Next Frontier?

He opens, saying, “Recently, we saw concerted attacks on clinical guidelines committees, but interestingly, not on the science coming out of them. Instead, the attacks were focused on whether the writers …

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Judging a guideline just by financial interest is intellectually lazy

The growth of integrative medicine in academic institutions

Education
September 9, 2011

The Atlantic published an article about the growth of quackademic medicine in our teaching institutions and it’s celebratory more than critical. It profiles the integrative medicine clinic of Dr. Brian Berman. That’s right, this Dr. Berman. I blogged about him four years ago and it seems his clinic at the University of Maryland is still going strong. Stronger, apparently.

The article, like integrative medicine itself, is a mixture of quackery …

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The growth of integrative medicine in academic institutions

A postmortem on the patient safety movement

Patient
December 8, 2010

Are patients better off than they were ten years ago?

Just over a decade ago the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released its celebrated report on patient safety, To Err is Human.  Many credit that report, which was released with great fanfare, with launching the patient safety movement.  So it’s appropriate to assess the movement’s impact eleven years later.  How did we do?

On November 25 the New England Journal of Medicine published …

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A postmortem on the patient safety movement