As the year draws to an end, it is a good time to reflect on all the changes that have occurred in the healthcare system. This was the year the ACA rolled out despite much opposition from doctors and patients alike. Many doctors are becoming disenchanted with the American healthcare system. Physician burnout rates are a record high and doctors are retiring younger and younger. Despite all the changes that took place in 2014, little input was asked from doctors practicing medicine on the frontlines.
What do doctors want for Christmas?
– Tort reform is high on the list. Malpractice premiums are getting costlier all the time. In fact, some specialists such as obstetricians stopped doing certain procedures because the liability insurance was unaffordable. In out tort happy society, anyone can file a claim for any reason. There needs to be a system in place to compensate those injured by malpractice. But, there needs to be a system in place that frivolous suits get thrown out early in the process. Many are advocating for caps on malpractice payouts and this is something worthwhile to consider. Also, verdicts are being decided by the public, often influenced by sympathetic victims rather than medical facts. We need to devise a system that these verdicts are decided by our peers in the medical profession.
– Meaningful use is something many physicians would simply like to go away. It is costly and time-consuming. It is causing turmoil on small practices. Most doctors do not feel that the metrics that are required have anything ti do with meaningful patient care but rather serve as a reporting system for the government and insurance companies.
– Penalties for not meeting CAQH measures need to be abolished. Again, we feel that these have nothing to do with quality patient care. Rather, they represent another system for harnessing data.
– Intrusions by third parties needs to be stopped. This includes prior authorizations, denied care, and any time an insurance company steps in and tells a doctor how to practice medicine. The doctor treating the patient in the exam room is the best one to practice medicine on any given patient.
– Novel genetic discoveries are being made seemingly every day, yet we are not seeing these results being devised into clinically useful tests in the exam room. We need to advance our ability to do genetic testing and more studies need to be done to find a way to implement gene therapies.
– We need improved cancer treatments. We have made great progress in curing cancer over the last several years but we still have much distance to go.
– We would like less press to pseudoscience and more to real science. Patients read the latest in therapies that have no proven benefit, such as nanosilver particles and essential oils, and then decide against conventional medicine. This is actually harmful when they throw out evidence based medicine for things with no proven efficacy.
– We need more effective vaccines against more infectious diseases, including Ebola, dengue fever and malaria. The best way to eliminate deaths from these diseases is to prevent them.
As the healthcare landscape continues to evolve before us, doctors need to have a louder voice in it.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2014 Linda Girgis, MD, FAAFP
