Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
What factors predict use of telemedicine? A paper by Reed et al. (2020) uses primary care data from Kaiser Permanente between 2016 and 2018 to find the answer. Note that these results are pre-COVID. Choosing telemedicine was statistically significantly associated with patient sociodemographic characteristics. For example, patients aged 65 years and over were less likely…
Electronic health records (EHR) are supposed to improve quality. While EHRs certainly are highly useful for information sharing, they may have adverse consequences. One issue may be that EHRs may induce fatigue in physicians and sap their needed energy/concentration away from their primary task: caring for patients. To test whether EHRs increase physician fatigue and…
What are digital therapeutics? What evidence is needed to support their value? How should we pay for them? I participated in Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy (AMCP) Partnership Forum: Digital Therapeutics which took place in September 2019. The findings from that forum are presented in a recent JMCP article. An excerpt from the article is…
Maybe they do and maybe they don’t. However, few patients actually access their electronic health record (EHR) when given the chance. According to a paper by Lin et al. (2019): On average, hospitals gave 95 percent of discharged patients access to view, download, and transmit their information, but only about 10 percent of those with…
Electronic health records (EHR) have the potential to greatly improve the quality of care. EHRs allow multi-specialty teams to access the same underlying medical information and eliminate the issue of miscommunication due to poor physician hand writing. At the same time, EHR increase data entry burden. Is the benefit of EHR worth the cost? One…
According to a paper by Moskatel and Slutsky (2019), the answer appears to be ‘yes’. In this paper, we ask whether UberX’s entry into a city caused substitution away from traditional ambulances for low‐risk patients, reducing overall volume. Using a city‐panel over‐time and leverage that UberX enter markets sporadically over multiple years, we find that…
An interesting article over at Kaiser Health News on electronic health records (EHRs): But 10 years after President Barack Obama signed a law to accelerate the digitization of medical records — with the federal government, so far, sinking $36 billion into the effort — America has little to show for its investment…Today, 96 percent of…
Health Affairs December 2018 issue focuses on telehealth. The general assumption is that telehealth is an unambiguous good. Getting access to health care providers–particularly those who live in remote areas or have transportation challenges–is certainly a good thing. But could telehealth increase the price of health care? In this thought exercise, pretend for a moment that…
Although this study about 18 months old, I just came across this and the findings were really surprising. During the office day, physicians spent 27.0% of their total time on direct clinical face time with patients and 49.2% of their time on EHR and desk work. While in the examination room with patients, physicians spent 52.9%…
Are urban or rural physician practices more likely to adopt electronic medical records (EMR)? The answer is suprrising. A paper by Whitacre (2016) finds the following: Overall practice-level EMR adoption rates generally increase with the degree of rurality and range from 47 percent in the most urban counties to over 60 percent in the most…