An article in the Washington Post caught my eye today. It features a young family practice physician who is frustrated with providing medical care in rural Virginia. She grew up in the Washington DC suburbs and went to top-class schools where she excelled. Now she lives in Charlottesville, VA and commutes 46 miles round trip […]
ICD Codes: You Will be the Death of Me.
This is a continuation of my earlier rant on Medicare/Medicaid. …Earlier this week, it was another patient. Also with osteomyelitis (a bone infection). Doing well however. I still had this patient on antibiotics and wanted to get bloodwork to monitor for potential adverse effects of the antibiotics. Knowing that bloodwork requires an ICD-code for billing […]
Medicaid/Medicare, this is not how it is supposed to be
I’ve been pushed towards my boiling point. Colleagues saw that I could raise my voice. Luckily I did not have one of my famous temper flares. What has gotten me worked up? Medicaid! I saw a consult in the hospital recently. A 50 something year old poorly controlled insulin dependent diabetic with dialysis dependent kidney […]
The Rash of Doctor Salary Posts from WSJ Health Blog
First, WSJ reported on the starting salaries of physicians and now they are reporting on the trend of increasing signing bonuses given to physicians. At first I was eager to learn how much physicians make (as I mentioned previously, medical students, residents, and fellows are often clueless about their future net-worth and either ballpark it […]
WSJ: How Much Do Rookie Doctors Make? The Latest Scorecard
This headline was very catching as I wanted to know the answer myself. The truth is a lot of medical students, residents, and fellows don’t actually know how much their first real salary will be. We hear low numbers from our academic supervisors and for those of us in primary care we begin to wonder […]