Medscape Medical News this week released its list of the “Best Places to Practice in America,” which evaluates each U.S. state to identify the most favorable environments for physicians.
For the list, Medscape divided the United States into six regions and evaluated states within those regions based on myriad physician-related criteria, including physician density, compensation, malpractice insurance, medical board activity, and state taxes.
My favorite part of this article is a quote from the authors of the study showing that doctors change behavior when they know the prices of their recommendations!
“Our findings suggest that simply displaying the Medicare allowable fee of diagnostic laboratory tests at the time of order entry can affect physician ordering behavior, even without any additional educational interventions,” the authors conclude in the study. And that in itself sounds like a cost effective way of altering behavior that could lower medical bills.
(via Doctors Go Shopping: Price Comparisons Lead MDs to Lower Testing Costs | TIME.com)
Interesting!
(via worlds-within-worlds)
Guys, this is important. At the 2012 DNC, Bill Clinton referred to physicians a debt creators. The Affordable Care Act (that little part in the article about decreasing Medicare payments) is going to be detrimental to physicians. Because the government, imo, either thinks doctors make a hell of a lot more than we do, or they vastly under value our services.
In five years, unless the ACA stops cutting Medicare reimbursments (by allowing balance billing of Medicare patients and by forcing non-compliant patients to be financially responsible when they don’t meet acceptable standards on Medicare’s pay for performance measures), there won’t be a physician in the country that will see Medicare patients, myself included. This situation is untenable. For everyone.
Thank you for posting this. Will be reading the blog entry from Dr. Brown!
A friend of mine emailed me this article today, telling me to never lose sight of what is important in the medical field. It got me thinking about what I have in store for me in my carrer. To put it concisely, it’s easy to lose focus amidst all the studying, paperwork, and bureaucratic maze that characterize medicine today. However, I feel that those who chose to enter the profession for the right reasons, among them being an unyielding dedication to patient care, would not resent their career choices. In fact, I feel what distinguishes the best from the average physician is the one doctor who comes each day with a renewed sense of purpose and a desire to make a difference, regardless of how naive that desire may be.
I’ll end this note with a quote from the article that really sums up what medicine is all about—something that characterizes the distinguished few students, physicians, nurses, and allied-health professionals who are happy to show up to work everyday:
“The awe of discovering the human body. The honor of being trusted to give advice. The gratitude for helping someone through a difficult illness. These things never grow old.”
(via worlds-within-worlds)
