How You — and Your Patients — Can Benefit From Med Tech
Physicians have an ever-increasing set of tools at their disposal. Medical technology affects healthcare systems, patient care and treatment, and public health. By understanding the med tech that is available today, doctors will be able to get the technology — and its benefits — to the patients who need it most.
Artificial intelligence (AI): AI-powered platforms can help with everything from administrative tasks to predicting future illness complications to helping diagnose genetic disorders in newborns.
Wearable tech and “sensored” tools: Wearables track and measure data and can alert patients and their physicians to important health events, inside and outside of hospital settings.
Digital therapeutics (DTx): DTx is used for many conditions, including mental health problems and opioid use disorder recovery, for instance. These are evidence-based FDA-approved treatments that physicians can prescribe to treat a variety of chronic conditions.
Do Self-Employed Docs Have It Better?
What are the pros and cons of practicing medicine on your own?
Medscape asked more than 740 self-employed US physicians about the pros and cons of their jobs, satisfaction with their income and work-life balance, job security, feelings about government agency regulations, future career plans, and other key topics.
Nine out of 10 self-employed doctors said that they have valuable advantages over peers who work for healthcare systems, according to Self-employed Physicians Report: Worth It to Be Your Own Boss?
The pros: Respondents said that they have considerable autonomy, control their own productivity, don’t have corporate-set productivity targets and can influence their income growth.
The cons: Respondents said that they must manage staff, must help run a business, and deal with more government regulations and that their income could flatten or decline at any time.
Read the full report.
Understanding Your Risks With COVID-19 Law Waivers (Blog)
The COVID-19 pandemic is waning and with it some regulations that may apply to healthcare entities.
Some new regulations remain in place, such as those related to telemedicine, but others may have already ended or will expire soon, and that could spell trouble for your practice.
Healthcare providers need to know which is which and confirm that they understood waivers or changes in the law on which they previously relied.
The Stark law: Otherwise known as the Physician Self-Referral Law, it usually prohibits physicians from referring Medicare patients to an entity in which the physician or an immediate family member has a financial interest. State and federal regulators temporarily waived some of the law’s regulations under COVID-19; that waiver remains in effect.
Medicare Anti-Markup Payment Limitations rule (AMPL): Some physicians mistakenly believed that the waiver of the Stark law also applied to AMPL. It did not, and physicians may have an obligation to identify and return payments to Medicare or other payers if they acted as if it did.
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