Last Helicopter out of Saigon

Plagiarized from The Health Care Blog

Last Helicopter Out of Saigon!
By JEFF GOLDSMITH
In popular psychiatry, a classic passive aggressive gambit is “malicious compliance”- intentionally inflicting harm on someone by strictly following a directive, even though the person knows that they are damaging someone by doing so. In Washington, the most skilled practitioner of this dark art is Speaker Nancy Pelosi If health reform craters, Pelosi will disingenuously claim that she did precisely what the President asked of her, and blame the Senate and the President for its failure.
In reality, Pelosi’s “leadership” almost fatally wounded health reform last summer. If the process does collapse, the blame should fall squarely on her shoulders. Her poor political judgment led directly not only to squandering a nearly 80 vote majority, but also exposed embarrassing and ill-timed disunity among Democrats on a signature domestic policy issue. It won’t be the Republicans that killed health reform, but incompetent Democratic Congressional leadership.
PLAGIARIZED FROM KEVIN MD
Electronic medical records need to better focus on patients
By Kevin on emr

The biggest problem with today’s push for electronic medical records is an archaic user interface.
Physician Alexander Friedman, writing a scathing essay in The Wall Street Journal, agrees.
Today’s electronic medical records are written for the benefit of insurance companies, which scrutinize each doctor’s note carefully for billing purposes. But, as Dr. Friedman astutely points out, “thorough, efficient billing doesn’t translate to better care.”
It’s gotten to a point where some doctors print out pages of data to bring to a patient encounter, or scan in dictated notes; both of which defeat the purpose of digital records in the first place.
There are scores of electronic medical records competing the gain market share — but each fails to communicate with one another, and all are burdened with a user interface circa Windows 95 that impedes clinical care.
It’s imperative that we divorce charting from medical billing, update interfaces to today’s standards, and return to why doctors write in the medical chart in the first place — to easier treat and benefit the patient