Thursday, February 26, 2009
Best care doesn't always get best ratings, doc finds
Medicare's Hospital Compare Web site attempts to help the public compare hospitals based on quality of care, but it can also make good doctors look bad, WhiteCoat blogs.
Case in point #1: Docs are required by offical quality indicators to give thrombolytics within 30 minutes of a heart attack patient's arrival. But what if that patient also just suffered a significant head injury? Does the doc try to meet the 30-minute window by skipping the CT scan, thus risking the patient's life if there is internal bleeding? Of course not, says WhiteCoat, but according to Hospital Compare, "my decision made me a bad doctor."
Don't trust everything you read on the comparison site, WhiteCoat concludes.
But how do patients separate the wheat from the chafe?
Labels: hospital medicine, quality reporting
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Albert Fuchs, MD, FACP, graduated from the
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also did his internal medicine training. Certified by the American
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full-time faculty member at UCLA School of Medicine before opening
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Berger
Zackary Berger, MD, ACP Member, is a primary care
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Ves
Dimov, MD, ACP Member, is an allergist/immunologist and Assistant
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where he evaluates and treats both pediatric and adult patients.
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Katz, MD
David L. Katz, MD, MPH, FACP, is an internationally
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Everything
Health
Toni Brayer, MD, FACP, blogs about the rapid
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FutureDocs
Vineet
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at the Pritzker School of Medicine for the University of Chicago. Her
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Hospital
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Gut
Check
Ryan Madanick, MD, ACP Member, is a gastroenterologist
at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, and the
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I'm
dok
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Kimberly Manning, MD, FACP,
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Coat Underground
Peter A. Lipson, MD, ACP Member, is a
practicing internist and teaching physician in Southeast Michigan.
The blog, which has been around in various forms since 2007, offers
musings on the intersection of science, medicine, and culture.
Other blogs of note:
American
Journal of Medicine
Also known as the Green
Journal, the American Journal of Medicine publishes original clinical
articles of interest to physicians in internal medicine and its
subspecialities, both in academia and community-based practice.
Clinical
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York University Medical Center's internal medicine residency program.
Faculty, residents and students contribute case studies, mystery
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space on the Internet for physicians to report and comment on the
medical news of the day.
PLoS
Blog
The Public Library of Science's open access
materials include a blog.
White
Coat Rants
One of the most popular anonymous blogs
written by an emergency room physician.

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