Cartoon of the Month – June
In an attempt to make up for decreasing reimbursements, physicians are starting to branch out into areas outside their specialties
Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Planning
Every day, businesses lose valuable data due to everything from a broken water main to a natural disaster. Most of the time, there was no process in place to recover that data. Frank Polack of Eviton LLC discusses what businesses in other industries already know about disaster recovery and business continuity and how your practice can quickly get back up and running after an unexpected event.
Industry Group Hopes to Benefit from Getting Doctors Wired
Membership growth tied to new tools provided to medical professionals
The International Association of Dental and Medical Disciplines (IADMD) is a grass-roots organization whose main focus is to push for industry and legislative changes in the health care system, while at the same time bringing its membership up to date on technology. One initiative is to provide doctors participating in local community health services the tools to track and account for the free services they provide. A recent article in Information Week explains how the IADMD hopes to benefit in several ways from technology awareness; among them increased membership and a larger group to support its lobbying efforts.
Bribing Doctors Towards EMR
Free computers not enough to convince doctors of investing in EMR
An article in Information Week described an attempt by WellPoint Health Networks Inc. to encourage its physicians to switch to electronic records or prescriptions by giving them a total of $42 million worth of PDAs and PCs. Alas, about one in four of the doctors did not take the offer. And only about 10% of the group bothered to use the PDAs for ePrescriptions.The federal government has proposed a plan to have a national health IT infrastructure supporting electronic health records for most Americans within a decade. Dr. David Brailer, the government’s first health IT czar, says that it is critical for small and solo practices to adopt EMR otherwise the plan is doomed to failure.One major reason cited for resistance by physicians is the ongoing cost of IT support for EMR in a medical practice. Not only is there no reimbursement to doctors for the capital investment for EMR systems, but physicians must also add IT support to their practice overhead, with no tangible return on investment in the foreseeable future.
Medical Practice Trends
It’s our mission here at Medical Practice Trends to be the most comprehensive online resource for medical practice management. Our seasoned team of real-world practitioners and industry experts are your peers and colleagues, working alongside you every day in the trenches of medical practice management. We strive to help you reduce your learning curve by passing on hard-earned knowledge about what works—and what doesn’t.
The tips, strategies, insight, analysis, and advice you find here will improve your bottom line—and let you enjoy the practice of medicine again. We’ll help you learn to run your practice like a business, instead of letting your practice run you into the ground. Check back often to keep in touch with the latest developments and innovations in the field. And don’t forget to subscribe to our free newsletter to have our most popular content delivered to your inbox in a convenient monthly digest format.
