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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alighieri who wrote (455424)	2/10/2009 11:47:10 AM
From: michael97123	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576295

I go into my own doctors office and there is more support staff than doctors and paper files stacked on the wall. At my annual checkup, my Dr. asks me the same questions each time--things that really dont change and looks thru the file trying to find the most recent bloodwork. Yup its broken.

To: Alighieri who wrote (455424)	2/10/2009 8:47:39 PM
From: i-node	Respond to of 1576295

My parents doctor in FL made us pay for his records when he faxed them up here after parents moved here. Also virtually ilegible and doctor here started from scratch. OMG. You can't be serious. You think a physicians office is going to provide medical records at NO CHARGE? You think it doesn't cost them anything to do it? There are many older docs who will NEVER go to electronic records. I talked with one this morning about the nonsense in the Stimulus plan. His words to me? "I've been looking for an excuse to retire". Of course, he's in his late 50s. I can think of 20 or more docs that will do the same thing. EMR is a good thing. Our customers love it. But it is tremendously expensive to implement. And there is already a pretty fast implementation schedule underway. Moving more quickly will, IMO, be counterproductive. Here's an example. One of the first phases of the mandate went into effect on Jan 1 -- a provision by which physicians could receive an extra 2% from Medicare if they used E-Prescribing. The full mandate happens in a couple of years. Okay, so we have several office who are all about implementing it to get their 2%. They buy the hardware, subscribe to the necessary services, and then when they find what they have to do to DOCUMENT that they used it, every LAST ONE OF THEM bailed. Government just cannot handle this stuff in a rational manner. At least they never have. To be sure, some insurance companies are train wrecks. The biggest is United Health Care -- the office I worked in today doesn't accept UHC patients because of the lousy fee schedules, slow payments, and difficulty in collecting. But even UHC is far better than Medicare and most state Medicaids. And don't even get me started about the NPI implementation. It was, undoubtedly, the biggest IT blunder I've seen. It just could not have been handled more poorly. And that was simply the process of assigning a standard ID # to providers. Imagine them trying to do the same with patients? (Already planned).