My dear friends, we come to praise Caesar. As we march toward 2016, we ought to acknowledge the great Roman emperor’s role in creating a proper calendar. At the start of Caesar’s reign, the calendar year lasted 355 days, 10¼ days fewer than the time it took the earth to fully orbit the sun.1 Although…
Nobody likes waiting to see their physician. In fact, a whopping 97% of patients are frustrated by wait times at the doctor’s office, a study has reported.1 That’s a lot of unhappy patients. Fortunately, a practice can do many things to help keep patient appointments on time—beginning with proper scheduling techniques and monitoring patients’ progress…
A recent trend to incorporate patient-reported outcomes (PROs) in clinical research, and ultimately clinical practice, is a response to the need to better measure and treat what patients truly care about, and adapt to the changing healthcare environment, which increasingly includes patient satisfaction as a key metric for overall quality of care, a metric tied…
Computerization of healthcare in general, and medical records in particular, has opened additional areas of liability for medical practices that many may not be addressing. A data breach of patient records can have major financial and business impacts on the practice when they occur. Data Intrusions Increasing The number of data intrusions hit a record…
Two months into the transition, the ICD-10 code set is still not exactly the most enticing reading material. But there is still so much to learn and apply, that it is necessary for physicians, coders and billers to stay abreast of the coding and billing guidelines. Although all of the guidelines and conventions may be…
Patient education has always been at the core of the nursing profession. Nurses pride themselves on being great teachers and patient advocates. When self-injectable biologics were first introduced to the market, one of the main goals was to make patients independent and put them in the driver’s seat of their own care. Yet without a…
As usual, your items in The Rheumatologist remain timely. In the case of attracting medical students into rheumatology, your piece is also timeless. For many years now, I have recommended to various officers of the ACR that we obtain a list of students and their home addresses when they are admitted to medical school. At…
I want to thank you for writing the article, “Attracting More Medical Students to Rheumatology” for The Rheumatologist (online, October 2015). I am a senior at Georgetown University now, and I have recently applied to medical school. I have considered pursuing a career in rheumatology, and your article has inspired me to stay on that…
NEW YORK (Reuters Health)—The “safety culture” of a hospital may be just as important in delivering high-quality surgical patient care as more technical issues like surgeon skill and operating room equipment, according to a new study. “The study supports what many surgeons have known for a long time, and that is that the organizational culture…
(Reuters Health)—Burnout among U.S. doctors is becoming more common and now affects more than half of practicing physicians, according to a new study.¹ About 54% of U.S. doctors experienced at least one symptom of burnout in 2014, compared to about 46% in 2011, researchers report in Mayo Clinic Proceedings. Overall, the researchers found that doctors are…