The "Rock Doc" stood in Miami federal court Monday sporting an all-black look of T-shirt, pants and sneakers but some not-so-hip accessories – shackles on his wrists and ankles. His grayish-blond hair, once worn in punk-style spikes, was disheveled. Christopher Gregory Wayne, dubbed the "Rock Doc,'' had been arrested at Larkin Community Hospital earlier in the day on a dozen charges of Medicare fraud. The longtime Miami Beach resident, 53, was accused of falsely billing the taxpayer-funded program for physical therapy procedures, such as massages and electrical stimulation, that were not necessary or in some instances had been provided at his prior medical practice in Miami.
The best way to explain the Gates Vascular Institute in Buffalo, N.Y., is to describe it as a club sandwich. It's kind of a funny way to refer to a world-class hospital that's doing very serious work, but it's about as accurate as you're going to get. Much like its lunchtime counterpart, the glassy 10-story building, situated in downtown Buffalo, is layered: A clinical vascular hospital takes up its bottom floors, a University of Buffalo-run research and laboratory space occupies the top floors, and sandwiched in the middle of it all is the "meat"—a two story collaborative core that acts as an innovation hub to connect researchers and practicing physicians from different specializations.
Millions of Americans will learn on Tuesday what President Barack Obama's landmark healthcare law actually means for them, as the administration opens new insurance marketplaces in 50 states despite the government shutdown. The launch marks a milestone for Obama's signature domestic policy achievement, which aims to provide subsidized healthcare to millions of the uninsured, the most ambitious U.S. social program since Medicare was introduced in the 1960s. The marketplaces, or exchanges, require health plans to provide a broad range of essential benefits that were not necessarily part of individual policies in the past, including mental health services, birth control and preventive care.
The Obama administration plans on Monday to announce scores of new health insurance options to be offered to consumers around the country by the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association and the United States Office of Personnel Management, the agency that arranges health benefits for federal employees, according to administration officials. The options are part of a multistate insurance program that Congress authorized in 2010 to increase options for consumers shopping in the online insurance markets scheduled to open on Tuesday.
While the federal government is incentivizing healthcare providers to implement and use electronic health records systems, and ramping up patient engagement efforts, the question of how many patients actually want to use digitized health data remains. Indeed, majorities of Americans are concerned about the security of their electronic data, according to a new poll, and more than two-thirds of respondents indicated that their physicians have not adequately explained the switch to digital records. As physicians race to adopt EHRs and collect federal incentive payments, a survey sponsored by Xerox suggests they need to do a better job educating their patients about the implications of digitized health information.
You can't change a lifestyle in 10 minutes from a jail-cell exam room. Yet every day we physicians willingly step into these cramped interrogation rooms and, like well-paid hamsters on wheels, churn through 20, 30 or more patients. We spend these 10-minute visits nibbling around the edges of lifestyle-related conditions and ailments, with little lasting effect. The results of these rushed visits may include "decreased patient satisfaction, increased patient turnover, or inappropriate prescribing." Reimbursement formulas encourage physicians to perform much more lucrative procedures. They enable physicians to bypass the time required to really help patients make the changes needed and move quickly on to another patient.