Guidelines have been established nationally for nearly every disease. But are doctors following them?
Recent information indicates that in cancer care, even the best cancer centers sometimes are not making decisions that comply with the guidelines that they themselves have made! For a complete discussion, see my recent Huffington Post article about this http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cary-a-presant-md/why-variability-in-cancer_b_5608227.html
Electronic medical records are becoming more common in doctor’s offices. One part of these software programs in some but not all electronic records is the online patient portal. These portals allow people to send messages to the doctor, get messages from the office, and review their tests and records.
It has been felt that use of these portals might make healthcare more efficient and reduce office visits, ultimately decreasing the costs of health care.
But…
Healthcare in America is becoming more complex. As described by M. Smith and coauthors in their recent article, “What’s Needed Is a Health Care System That Learns,” each Medicare patient now has an average of 7 doctors in 4 different practices, and each doctor must interact with over 200 other physicians to care for all of the practice’s Medicare patients. It is expected that the increase in chronic conditions by 26% between 2000…
You can find out what is in your doctor’s medical notes about you, and reading it can save your life. In a recent study by Dr. Tom Delbanco and coauthors, patients were invited to see their doctor’s record of a recent office visit. About 80% of patients looked at the notes. Compared to patients who did not look at…