Hot MedFax

 Think what it would be like to be able to read your doctor's notes about you. You'd prbably love it until you got to the part where he writes you're fat. Willamette Health Partners in Oregon will soon experiment with allowing patients to get access to their doctors’ medical notes online, according to statesmanjournal.com. Called OpenNotes , Salem Health’s outpatient clinics are joining a number of other health care organizations in the Northwest that are already practicing Open Notes or intend to in the next year or two. They include Kaiser Permanente, Legacy Health, Oregon Health & Science University, Providence Medical Group Oregon, The Portland Clinic, The Vancouver Clinic and Portland VA Medical Center. Shea Corum of Salem Health tells Saerom Yoo the pilot program will help assess whether patients find the additional information helpful and whether it stimulates more productive conversations. It will also demonstrate how patients' access to these notes ...

I don't know about you but a doctor has to do something really bad (like miss a second cancer) for me to consider switching.  But a new study has found that p atients with an existing relationship with a doctor in a lower performing segment of the marketplace "were no more likely to switch doctors than patients with higher performing doctors," according to newswise.com. Other parts of the study found that p atients with doctors ranked in lower performing tiers were more likely to switch health plans than other patients. The Web site reports that m any health insurers now rank their physicians into tiers based on quality and cost and provide financial incentives to members for choosing a doctor in a higher tier. These tiered networks are designed to promote competition and quality improvement among providers. Research showed that,  while patients selecting a tiered doctor for a first-time visit, patients were likely to "choose one ranked in the best performing ...

Mindfulness .   The concept has been kicked around for some time.  You know, closing your eyes (or not) and just letting thoughts come in and out of your mind without following them, just being there, in the moment.  It's kind of like meditation but that word scares a lot of people away, so mindfulness was coined. You'd certainly want your doctor to do a little of this, before surgery, wouldn't you?  Well, now, Pauline Chen, herself a doctor, is writing at her New York Times blog that practicing it may just may help physicians avoid stress and burnout. " Research over the last few years has revealed that unrelenting job pressures cause two-thirds of fully trained doctors to experience the emotional, mental and physical exhaustion characteristic of burnout," she reports. "Health care workers who are burned out are at higher risk for substance abuse, lying, cheating and even suicide. They tend to make more errors and lose their sense of empathy for others....

Admit it.  Wouldn't you love to know what your doctor's saying about you when he taps away on his iPad? Is it that you need to lose weight?  Or see a therapist? Or, God forbid, you smell?  Or is he secretly just checking his email? Well, now, in some parts of the country, you can.  According to fastcoexist.com, a new app, OpenNotes, allows doctors to share their notes with patients as part of treatment. If you're a patient at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, rural Pennsylvania’s Geisinger Health System and Seattle’s Harborview, you're one of the lucky ones.  These medical centers recently completed the first trial of OpenNotes and 14,000 patients got to see immediately after their appointments the electronic notes penned by their doctors and nurses, the story notes. Here's the best news of all.  The study found that 60% of patients reported they took medications more regularly (up to 30% of prescriptions are usually not filled and up t...

I suppose it's a no-brainer but obese people trust overweight physicians over normal-weight physicians on diet advice, according to a new study . Physicians' body mass indexes (BMIs) were measured to determine size.  But interestingly, doctors were on the scales for another reason in the study.  Patients also didn't like going to obese physicians. I can certainly relate to that.  One of my favorite GPs was a doc with a bulging middle, and though I really enjoyed spending time with him (more than five minutes, another fave), I couldn't help thinking how much it could possibly be helping me to see someone with health authority who was, well, fat.  How well was he taking care of himself ? On the other hand, studies have also revealed that many physicians who are normal weight look down their noses at overweight patients.  Studies have found that doctors are nicer to thin people, treating them with the kindness and warmth they don't feel for their heavier pa...

So how much should it cost to go to the hospital?  We've all heard the horror stories.  People without healthcare wind up being charged excessively more than those with insurance (because hospitals give big deductions to insurance companies because of volume).  Even worse, sometimes one hospital can charge you $28,000 for what treatment at another would be less than half of that. According to Sarah Kliff and Dan Keating at The Washington Post, the federal government today will release the prices that hospitals charge for the 100 most common procedures.  Hospitals in the past kept this secret, because of competition. Just as you'd expect, the numbers reveal a wide disparity in prices.  The numbers reveal a tremendous, unexplained variation in cost of services, Kliff and Keating report.   For example, in the District of Columbia, "George Washington University’s average bill for a patient on a ventilator was $115,000, while Providence Hospital’s average c...

A fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal today reported that a survey taken in 2009 found that 28% of patients admitted to lying to their doctors about how many drinks a week they had, cigarettes they smoked in a day and how often they exercised. But the medical profession puts it at more than almost triple that -- at 77%. Writer Sumathi Reddy said that it's often because people don't want to disappoint their doctors.  So doctors often add on to what we tell them.  Four drinks a week?  Make that eight, docs say, and base their treatment on that number. What if you're like me, and don't lie (at least, about this stuff)?  Are we then being under- or overtreated?  Reddy didn't say.  But "doctors say omitting important information or lying can lead to the wrong treatment, medicine or even diagnosis," according to the article. Parents, on the other hand, sometimes lie when they don't want to be judged.  Reddy gives the example of a mother te...