MARCH 1998

Physicians and other providers will soon have a chance to bypass the middleman and compete in managed Medicare.

Help your patients become medical decision makers who take an active role in their own care.

Do you feel you're losing control over your practice? Read how one family physician has learned to manage both planned and unexpected changes.

Feeling weighed down by details and paperwork? Here are some ideas for lightening the load of multiple managed care plans.

“Just let us be doctors!” The cry that begins our cover story this month probably calls forth echoes from the minds of many readers. Can anyone “just be a doctor” these days? Apparently not where managed care plays a large role, as the cover story suggests. And certainly not…

The current mantra of the Continuous Quality Improvement movement is, “Variation is the enemy of quality.” The gurus of CQI would warn that such a slogan simplifies their science, but many managed care organizations seem to operate on the principle that there is one best way to…

To liberally paraphrase Winston Churchill, never have so many been so confused by something designed to affect so few. The “something” in question is the private-contracting provision of the 1997 Balanced Budget Act (BBA). That provision has been misunderstood, misinterpreted…

The situation: You check in on a patient who is a resident at the local nursing home. A year has passed since he became a resident, and it is time to conduct his annual assessment. The patient has multiple chronic health problems: Alzheimer-type dementia (AD); stable…

AMA seeks more input about documentation guidelines | Company takes new tiered approach to drug co-payments | Business groups trying to stop patients' rights bills | Minorities lead drop in applications to U.S. medical schools | Health benefit costs expected to rise, despite…

You and your staff no doubt spend a lot of time keeping straight the details of your patients' health insurance plans and trying to collect from them. As you know well, some are certainly better than others. But your patients aren't the only ones you want to have good health…

As speakers, family physicians are in demand. Community groups ask you to help them understand our complex, ever-changing health care system. A local high school requests your insights on the medical profession at “career day.” A residency program needs an inservice on…

Effective promotion of your practice is as close as the brochures on arthritis, breast cancer, diabetes and other topics displayed in your waiting room or the handout on childhood vaccines that you give to parents. Patient education is not only an important service to your…

Regina Santos, MD, has a meeting this morning with the nurses in her practice. She has been dissatisfied with patient flow; she feels that the nurses' processes are inefficient and cause unnecessary delays. She has given the matter a lot of thought and wants to propose a way…

Could managed care actually be boosting the incomes of primary care physicians? That's the story from a recent Ernst & Young survey, which found that primary care physicians averaged $136,000 last year in managed care environments, 5 percent more than their counterparts in…