5 ways virtual doctors can help during a natural disaster

--------------------------------------------------------------- Here are the stories you missed on KevinMD. Thank you for your continuing readership. --------------------------------------------------------------- Sponsors [3 ways to enhance workflows of nurses](. Technology can help bring nurses back to the bedside by giving nurses the right tools to optimize their workflows. Learn more by exploring the communication strategies and use cases in this eBrief. [Read the eBrief now](. 64 percent of malpractice claims involving opioids happen in the outpatient setting -- and patient injuries are more severe than in inpatient claims. [What can be done to ensure safe prescribing?]( [Is your hospital communication system trapped in the dark ages?]( Just like a medieval page boy, pagers are annoying and inefficient. This leads to delayed patient care, frustrated providers, and potential HIPAA breaches. Learn why you need to ditch your [Page Boy]( today. [Infographic]( Behind every patient's hospital journey is an entire team of dedicated people. Join patient John Smith as he travels from admission to discharge and see how efficient communications support his health services. [Learn more](. --------------------------------------------------------------- KevinMD Today: Aug. 31, 2017 [5 ways virtual doctors can help during a natural disaster]( In Houston, all of my colleague’s offices are closed, and there is limited access to the Texas Medical Center due to Hurricane Harvey. As a virtual medical doctor, there was only one thought on my mind this entire weekend, “How can I help?” As a Floridian, I have certainly faced my share of natural disasters […] [The mythical unicorn of vaccine denialists]( I swiped this editorial cartoon by Steve Sack from the redoubtable Dr. David Gorski’s blog, who goes by the nom-de-web of Orac. Recent epidemiology shows reducing the fraction of vaccinated children in the population rather promptly leads to a resurgence of the diseases vaccines protect against. This is the concept of community or herd immunity. Epidemiologists debate the […] [15 tips for working with women]( I work in a male-dominated field. As a cardiac anesthesiologist, I work with mostly male cardiac surgeons in a department where the majority of my fellow anesthesiologists are male. I work with some fantastic male colleagues. They are caring, skilled doctors, and I consider many of them to be friends. While most of them know […] --------------------------------------------------------------- [An inspiring KevinMD keynote]( will make your event memorable. "Kevin's keynote presentation at our annual members meeting was perfect. Extremely rich in content, and a delivery that is world class." [Visit Kevin's speaking page]( to find out more. --------------------------------------------------------------- [The white coat symbolizes 2 important commitments]( A white coat ceremony address to the University of California, Riverside School of Medicine, August 4, 2017. “It takes a village” is one of my favorite proverbs, an African proverb, that resonates with each of us on this monumental day. There is without a doubt that every one of you worked very hard to get into […] [Patient first: How EHRs can better serve our shared mission]( An exchange between former Vice-President Joe Biden and EPIC CEO Judy Faulkner at a Biden Cancer Initiative event has again elevated the discussion of patient access to their medical records. You can read the discussion on Politico. However, Biden’s main point was that patients needn’t justify their claim to their own EHR records. In fairness to […] [Fix the pay imbalance between specialists and primary care physicians]( Reformers have expended considerable effort to change the way Medicare buys health care for millions of Americans, finding a wide range of support across the political spectrum. But Medicare’s current structure may doom these reforms. Some primary care doctors fear that the skewed incentives in Medicare’s pricing system will get built into any new system, […] [Physicians: Use your voice to make the difference]( Recently, there have been many times when you may have gotten a news alert on your phone or checked the latest Twitter hashtag and wanted to scream. Or you were too busy to even check until later that day and did not know what to say other than to lurk and watch a train wreck […] [4 times a bedside ultrasound made a difference this week]( I bought a pocket ultrasound in 2011, determined to learn how to perform and interpret ultrasound at the bedside and thus transform my internal medicine practice. I bought it new, and it cost over $8,000. That was a staggering amount of money to spend on something I knew very little about. In 2015 after having […] [5 reasons why doctors don’t seek mental health care]( 1. Lack of confidentiality. May have to turn over medical records to others who control your career. 2. State medical boards demand to know. May be excluded from practicing medicine in that state. 3. Hospitals demand to know. May be excluded from hospital staff privileges. 4. Insurance plans demand to know. May be excluded from insurance contracts. 5. […] [A patient becomes the teacher]( It was an ordinary day in clinic — I had gotten very behind schedule when a 90-year-old gentleman, who was in for his third visit in a month related to falls, came in with his equally frail wife. We had to spend extra time discussing his placement in a nursing home for safety concerns. I […] [9 reasons the “golden age of medicine” was golden]( To listen to all those desperate to reform health care, you get the impression that physicians are pretty horrible people. We are all sexist, greedy, money grubbing tyrants who will perform unnecessary tests and procedures just to make money. We don’t care about quality or cost. We are killing off 250,000 patients every year with […] [A reminder of how important bedside manner is]( Being a physician is hard. Really hard. Four years of medical school, multiple years of residency and perhaps fellowship training add up to years of working endless days in a row and powering through exhausting nights. For many of us, this need to be able to power through continues even when we finally make it […] [“That’s crazy”: Stop using psychiatric words as insults]( Words matter. At some point, we all may have casually tossed a psychiatric adjective to describe a situation or person. There is usually no malicious intent behind the use of these colloquialisms. However, during these strange and unprecedented political times, psychiatric terms seem to be thrown around more so by those trying to paint a […] [Will bots replace docs?]( In days of yore, people in distress usually turned to family, friends and occasionally the clergy for help but for many years now, much of the burden of dealing with human misery has been transferred to medical professionals. Going forward and given that the iPhone and social media are ubiquitous in the daily lives of […] [Hospital sushi and the 5 stages of grief]( Prologue It’s 1:30 p.m. on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. You’re on call, and hungry, and having not had the forethought to make food ahead of time, you decide you’ll take your chances and see what the hospital cafeteria has to offer. You bustle your way past screaming children, harried caregivers, and distracted hospital staff with their heads […] [We are clinicians in the era of information overload]( The age-old saying is that knowledge is power. But what happens when you are overwhelmed with the information you need to make a decision without the understanding of how that information fits together to answer your question? It’s like trying to put together a large, complex puzzle without a finished picture for comparison. Oh, and […] [Alarm fatigue is problem. Here’s a pragmatic solution.]( I missed a drug interaction warning the other day when I prescribed a sulfa antibiotic to Barton, a COPD patient who is also taking dofetilide, an uncommon antiarrhythmic. The pharmacy called me to question the prescription, and I quickly changed it to a cephalosporin. The big red warning had popped up on my computer screen, […] --------------------------------------------------------------- You are receiving this email because you subscribed to the KevinMD e-newsletter. If a friend sent you this email and you want to subscribe, go to [KevinMD](. --------------------------------------------------------------- 173 Daniel Webster Highway Nashua, New Hampshire 03062 [Unsubscribe]( | [Change Subscriber Options](