RedScrubs
The Resource for Medical Professionals

If republican presidential hopeful Senator McCain wins the White House in November, our current healthcare system as we know it will go from bad to worse. The tax credit that McCain is proposing would mean that millions of people would be shopping for individual health insurance policies on their own.

Relinquishing the practice of mandatory overtime for nurses continues to take time. Pennsylvania legislature is now chewing over legislation that would prohibit healthcare organizations from instituting mandatory overtime for nurses and other direct patient care providers.

Healthcare transparency is finally spilling over into the insurance market place where the public will begin to see pricing data from Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Wisconsin. The plan is to let policy holders and others see what the insurance carrier is contracting in terms of pricing for certain services between hospitals and providers.

With a wide range of prices in the Wisconsin area

Several lines of the page in all sorts of media have been devoted to the evaluative concepts of healthcare organization ratings and physician provider ratings. Many websites dot the web with such databases for patients of all types to delve into and either look for a new provider or submit a subjective evaluation based on their most recent healthcare experience.

The June 10th health section of the New York Times caught my eye with an interesting piece describing a pediatrician’s difficult decision to “fire” a patient because of the poor relationship between the provider and the patient’s mother. Clearly not a daily occurrence in the healthcare world, but it does happen and we all know many patients that have switched “fired” their own doctors and have obtained new ones.

Information technology (IT) specific to healthcare has become a hot item on a national scale as well as in the international healthcare community. It is safe to say I think that the electronic medical record (EMR) has come of age and before long all healthcare organizations will be utilizing various software platforms to document clinical findings, patient hospitalization courses, and a host of other patient related items that are now done with ink and paper. Healthcare IT will clearly ensure software engineers job security well into the future and will open several doors for clinicians desiring to make the transition from the bedside to a desk.

Some potentially great news for patients with hypertension some time down the road as long as the clinical trials go off without a hitch. Investors seem to be pleased with the preliminary results and so does the stock market. However this is what healthcare has become, this is the beginning of one of the many ailments with our current healthcare delivery system - Investor interests.

Third party payers such as Medicare and Medicaid as well as privately based insurers need to refocus their attention on what is in the best interest of the patient. In an attempt to force industry change payers have restricted their reimbursement rates, increased premium costs for patients and employers, and developed lists of medical conditions that they [payers] feel are avoidable and thus will not provide any remuneration for.

A new level of healthcare transparency is being implemented in Ohio at Alliance Community Hospital where it is paying patients $100 for their hospital bills and explanation of benefits (EOB). The information is put on their web site comparing themselves with other hospitals for patients to view. The goal as reported in amednews is to provide prospective patients that typically use competing hospitals for healthcare services to come over and use Alliance’s healthcare system.