Do We Still Need Office Visits?
Like many primary care practices, after a hasty transition to a year of phone calls and video visits, my practice is slowly transitioning back to “normal,” meaning that we are now seeing more patients in person than by video. However, as I reflect on the past year, I wonder how central this notion of the […]
Three Medical Facilities, Three Different Prices For a Typhoid Shot
After receiving a typhoid shot at his primary care doctor’s office, Jeff Blatt was caught off guard when his insurance didn’t cover it, and he was left with a bill double what other facilities charge. Blatt got the shot at Scarsdale Medical Group in Westchester, New York, back in February to prepare for a vacation […]
Primary Care Strategy Fails to Reduce Kidney-Dysfunction Triad Hospitalizations
Using a personalized algorithm to identify primary care patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD), type 2 diabetes, and hypertension (the kidney-dysfunction triad) — plus practice facilitators to help providers deliver guideline-based interventions — didn’t move the needle for reducing hospitalizations, the ICD-Pieces study found. At 1 year, the hospitalization rate of patients in the intervention […]
Doctors Warn Patients May Be Billed Twice
A primary care clinic in Charlotte, North Carolina, has a sign stating that if a patient raises a concern beyond the original scope of the visit, they may be billed separately for doing so. Atrium Health Primary Care Mountain Island certainly isn’t alone in posting such a notice. In recent months, a MedPage Today reader […]
Perioperative Complications Not Deciding Factor Between Two Bariatric Procedures
For patients undergoing primary bariatric surgery, perioperative complications and safety were similar between laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy and laparoscopic Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB), the randomized BEST trial found. Incidence of any adverse event (AE) at 30 days didn’t significantly differ, occurring in 4.6% of sleeve gastrectomy and 6.3% of RYGB patients (OR 0.71, 95% CI 0.47-1.08, […]
Opinion | The Truth About What Health Information Exchanges Can and Cannot Do
Turbow is a primary care physician and health services researcher. Ali is a family physician and vice chair of research. Most people think their doctor has access to all their health information, no matter where they were seen. You’ve probably experienced this firsthand: a patient arrives for an appointment, only for you to lack access […]
FDA Clears AI-Powered Non-Invasive Skin Cancer Detector
The FDA cleared an artificial-intelligence (AI)-powered device designed to non-invasively detect skin cancer in the primary care setting, the agency announced on Tuesday. Developer DermaSensor said the device uses AI-powered spectroscopy technology to non-invasively evaluate cellular and subcellular characteristics of a lesion for any of the three common skin cancers — melanoma, basal cell carcinoma, […]
Opinion | Would You Switch a Patient’s Medication If You Knew the Cost?
Sloan is a primary care physician and health services researcher. Goss is an associate professor of emergency medicine and clinical informatics. Sinaiko is a researcher and assistant professor of health economics and policy. Put yourself into your patients’ shoes for a moment. Imagine you are visiting your primary care provider (PCP) today to follow up […]
For Kids, Sleep Study Needed to Parse out the Kind of Snoring That Means Surgery
Mild obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) was not easily distinguishable from primary snoring in children without polysomnography, analysis of randomized clinical trial data showed. The only clinical and demographic factors significantly more commonly associated with mild OSA than primary snoring were Black race (OR 2.08), obesity (OR 1.80), and high urinary cotinine levels above of 5 […]
Statins Reach More Patients With Pharmacist’s Orders
PHILADELPHIA — One way of looping remote pharmacists into the primary care clinician workflow successfully boosted statin initiation in the cluster-randomized SUPER LIPID trial. Researchers devised an intervention of asynchronous automated orders, a centralized approach using pharmacists to discuss and prescribe statins without a doctor’s visit. This led to most orders cosigned (73.7%) and a […]