Recently I visited a medical specialist I have known for twenty five years. Back then I was a new hospital President and he was a junior attending. About ten years later I became his patient. And hadn’t seen him in two years. When he saw me he said “hello Dr. Metsch” and I responded “hello
Recently a friend was told by his doctor he needed an MRI and said that he could get it at the hospital on the campus where the doctor’s office was located, or at a private imaging center two blocks away. This reminded me of the mystery of the Claustrophobia Cluster about twenty years ago, in
With the guidance of an experienced and thoughtful physician I just made a decision to end a course of diagnostic testing after slowly getting to that decision point. But I have family members and friends who have gone through a full “best practices” diagnostic regimen only to wind up in an ambiguous situation, then having
You may have wondered how Obamacare pays for medical care for the 20 million+ newly insured. If you don’t understand the incentives and disincentives to hospitals and physicians and get caught in the regulatory quagmire, then you will be the payor! Using Medicare, here’s an example of how three related concepts determine whether or not
Over the past five years teaching in a health care MBA program, I had a number of students who were physical therapists. They had DPT (Doctor of Physical Therapy) degrees, worked at prestigious academic medical centers in NYC, but did not want to be, or were not called Doctor at work. At one of the
Let’s start with the “GOLDEN HOUR.” “The golden hour is a window of opportunity in which rapid medical intervention can save a patient’s life or make a significant difference in the level of impairment a patient experiences after recovering from a medical emergency. People often use this term in the context of trauma medicine, where