Vol VI No. 684 - Part 1e - Doctor KevinMD - Social media's leading physician voice: Information Shared

Surgeon suicide-homicide: What happened to Dr. Chris Dawson? Click to teach Gmail this conversation is important. Inbox x KevinMD Plus newsletter@kevinmd.com via aweber.com  5:22 AM (19 hours ago) to me Here are the stories you missed on KevinMD.  Thank you for your continuing readership.   Sponsors 6 strategic advantages of hospital contact center consolidation. Find out why unifying your infrastructure can streamline processes and deliver better customer service. Read the eBrief now. 2017 was a year of devastating floods, hurricanes, wildfires, and shootings. Now is the time to protect your medical practice before the next natural disaster or violent incident strikes. For every 100 appointments, seven won’t show. With a $20 co-pay and average reimbursement of $90, your practice is losing as much as $41,000/year. Tired of calling patients to remind them about appointments? Get that time and money back now.  What hospital CIOs are prioritizing for 2018: View infographic.   Patient misidentification can lead to medical errors, patient harm, and costly inefficiencies for providers. Get the facts on patient misidentification, and learn how to avoid it from organizations that use biometrics to do so.     KevinMD Plus: Jan. 4, 2018 Surgeon suicide-homicide: What happened to Dr. Chris Dawson? Sometimes there are no words. Not even a eulogy. Then one courageous family writes this obituary. (This obituary was written by Rachel Dawson, his wife, with the blessing of his parents.) In it, they share how their son lost his battle with severe depression. How he adored his children. How he sacrificed fun, free time, and […]   How to choose between a traditional and Roth 401(k) In my post, “Use it Or Lose It,” I talked about the awesome benefits of the Roth IRA.  You do have to pay taxes on the money now, but it grows tax-free, and you can withdraw the money after age 59.5 without owing any taxes.  It’s the only way to win the tax game.  It is 100% your […]   5 ways to get out of the physician burnout black hole Practicing medicine with all of its responsibilities often reminds me of a black hole. It seems each time something new is added it gets pushed into the vast vortex of the black hole, hidden from those around you and jumbled with everything you are expected to do. People around you see the world as you […]   Doctors aren’t just white coats without a face Doctors are all the same: A sea of uniform “white coats without a face” caring for “patients without a face.” They heal the sick. They save lives. And they drive their fancy sports cars to their expensive homes and cushy lives. Not. Continue reading ... Your patients are rating you online: How to respond. Manage […]   A physician remembers his son’s birth plan Did this delivery go according to the birth plan?  It did, until this physician received the hospital bill. Brad Nieder is a physician and comedian and can be reached at the Healthy Humorist. Your patients are rating you online: How to respond. Manage your online reputation: A social media guide. Find out how.   An inspiring KevinMD keynote will make your event memorable. "Kevin's keynote presentation was perfect. Extremely rich in content, and a delivery that is world class." Visit Kevin's speaking page to find out more.   Collaboration with hospitalists, rather than competition, improves patient care It’s been 21 years since Drs. Robert Wachter and Lee Goldman, in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, first described a new delivery model called “hospitalists” – clinicians whose primary professional focus is the care of hospitalized patients. Since that time the healthcare system has seen rapid growth of hospitalist programs across a variety […]   What would you do if you won the lottery? Here’s one physician’s plan. Yup, I won the lottery! $785 million dollars. Pinch me because I must be dreaming. I am a physician finance blogger; I would not recommend buying a lottery ticket. But I did. So screw all the people who said it was a waste of $2. So here I am, the big time winner: What to […]   Should you give up your Starbucks latte? You’ve probably heard of the Starbucks latte effect. As the theory goes, small changes, multiplied and compounded over time, can end up becoming big savings. For example, if you drink 1 Starbucks latte for $3.50 every day for 250 work days a year, then over 10 years, you’ll have spent tens of thousands of dollars […]   Why is health communication so poor? Here are 5 reasons why. Many of the everyday coalface problems we face in health care are simply due to suboptimal communication. It could be the patient or family member who doesn’t know what’s going on in the hospital, the nurse who is confused about orders, or the doctor who doesn’t understand the reasoning behind the seemingly terrible administrative directive […]   Relative risk reduction is a troublesome way to convey the benefits of treatments How excited would you be about a medication that lowered your risk of cardiovascular death, heart attack or stroke by 1.5%? Excited enough to spend a few thousand dollars a year on the drug? I expect not. What if, instead, the drug reduced those same terrible outcomes by 20%? That’s probably enough benefit to interest […]   A medical student spoken word on burnout Medical student Peter Rezkalla with a spoken word on burnout.  See more at his YouTube channel. Your patients are rating you online: How to respond. Manage your online reputation: A social media guide. Find out how.   A physician helps a retired couple rebalance their portfolio. Here’s what he did. In January of this year, I wrote one of my favorite posts after helping a retired couple free themselves from their financial advisor, greatly simplify their portfolio, and saving them more than $20,000 per year in the process. For details, please read “From 28 Funds to 3,” then return here for a follow-up. In summary, […]   The CDC word ban: an attack on the patients I treat When I read the Washington Post article about the CDC censoring seven words last Friday night, my mind immediately jumped to the youth I take care of every day in my Baltimore clinic.  It felt like a direct attack on the very patients I became a doctor to treat: the transgender young person initiating gender-affirming […]   Doctors who wear scrubs outside of a medical setting Doctors who wear scrubs outside of a medical setting.  Here’s what this physician thinks about that. Brad Nieder is a physician and comedian and can be reached at the Healthy Humorist. Your patients are rating you online: How to respond. Manage your online reputation: A social media guide. Find out how.   The patients behind the cool cases “Wow, cool case,” was the response from the residents in continuity clinic on Monday morning as I told them about a patient I had seen over the weekend at our main campus urgent care. Ironically, or maybe more tellingly, I thought the same thing; “that was a cool case.” The “cool case” was a senior […]   After #MeToo, have the rules changed? In the wake of the recent flood of allegations of sexual harassment against so many men in so many different positions of power, the refrain has begun, “The rules have changed.” Frivolous concerns about office holiday parties threaten to trivialize the remarkable transformation of women finally being believed, and men finally beginning to be held […]   It’s time to make oral contraceptives available without a prescription At his recent confirmation hearing, Alex Azar, President Trump’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, was grilled by senators who wanted to know where he stands on requiring employers to provide oral contraception coverage in their employee health plans — even if employers object on religious or moral grounds. While avoiding specifics, Azar committed […]   Why are so many doctors doing multi-level marketing? My goal with this post is to try to answer some of the more popular questions that we get asked about multi-level marketing (MLM). Why write about it? Besides the fact that my wife and I are involved in one, and it’s made a significant impact on our income, the number of physicians getting involved these […]