You probably know that I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about the health care system — it is my job here at Vox, after all. But what you might not know is that, over the past year, I’ve have spent a lot of time as a patient of the American health care system — more than any year of my life.
Kelly Kerber didn’t have to go far to find a job. She was in the second of three years of post-medical school training when she was offered a job as an internal medicine physician. Kerber was one of eight internal medicine residents working at Sanford Health in Fargo — five of whom signed on with Sanford.
Imagine a health care system where every time you want your annual checkup, you must see a cardiologist to get your heart checked, an ENT to get your ears and throat checked, a GI doc to get your abdomen checked, and so on and so forth. Sounds pretty terrible and needlessly expensive, right? This hypothetical dystopia, however, isn’t too far off from the direction that the American health care system is going.
U.S. doctors are tapping into their electronic medical records to identify unvaccinated patients and potentially infected individuals to help contain the worst U.S. measles outbreak in 25 years. New York’s NYU Langone Health network of hospitals and medical offices treats patients from both Rockland County and Brooklyn, two epicenters of the outbreak.
Emergency room doctors are saying they are getting assaulted more often than they have before, with about 7 in 10 physicians saying it is increasing. In a study done by the American College of Emergency Physicians, 80 percent say that violence in the emergency room harmed patient care.
Eastern Niagara Hospital is getting ready for some major changes next year as part of its 2020 transformation plan. The changes include expanding the emergency room and investing in Great Lakes Medical Imaging, a radiology group with offices across Western New York.