geoffrey modest medical blogs

response to: surprise billing G      Geoff A. Modest, M.D. Fri 12/20/2019 7:51 AM Geoff A. Modest, M.D.  Mitchell Wice made the following comments (and agreed to their circulation). Mitch is a recent graduate from Boston Medical Center and is  at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai as  an Integrated Fellow in Geriatrics and Palliative Care ------- Another area of "surprise billing" is hospice. Because the way the hospice benefit is written into medicare with primary hospice doctor vs secondary seeing your PCP or specialist without prior special arrangements with the hospice can result in most of the bills and labs being denied when submitted to insurance and patients being left to pay out of pocket (at least medications can be picked up by part D). This is even more true as people try to refer to hospice earlier and earlier, which is a good thing. 

This blog is more of an FYI about a huge problem in our health care system, “surprise billing” ( see  https://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/dynamic_article_popover.aspx?artguid=31669217-2e22-4bf2-a9f0-1cbbe5c3e42d&appid=1165   ). This editorial was written by Ashish J. Jha, a professor of health policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and director of the Harvard Global Health Institute Details: -- “surprise billing” is when a patient who has health insurance opens their mail to find an exorbitant bill from a clinician that they do not know. In general, the patient may go to a hospital or provider in their insurance network, but unbeknownst to them they are seen by a provider not in their network and then receives a large bill from them -- most commonly, surprise billing comes from emergency rooms. Though the emergency room may will be part of the patient’s network, the ER physician who happens to see the patient may well be from an ER group that is no

electronic health record and physician burnout G      Geoff A. Modest, M.D. Wed 12/18/2019 7:25 AM Geoff A. Modest, M.D.  A study from the Mayo Clinics found a strong association between perceived electronic health record usability by  physicians  and professional burnout (see  electronic med record MD burnout mayo2019  in   dropbox , or doi.org/10.1016/j.mayocp.2019.09.024 ). Details: -- cross-sectional survey of US physicians from all specialty disciplines from October 2017 through March 2018, using the American Medical Association Physician Masterfile -- 30,456 physicians were invited to do a survey, 5197 (17%) completed it.      -- 1250 (25%) of them were randomly chosen to receive a sub-survey evaluating electronic health record (EHR) usability; (70%) completed it, leaving 870 evaluable results      -- overall, 57% male, median age 53 (7% <35yo, 22% 35-44