Visit this section of the website from time to time to read the most recent opinions of a solo practitioner striving to maintain a good quality practice in tumultuous times. The medical field is under siege by “third parties” of the medical-industrial complex.
Office management and medical decision making is slipping from the hands of your doctor to bureaucrats in the government and administrators of your insurance plan thanks to legislation and regulations passed behind closed doors. The trend is for practices to band together into big conglomerates to share expenses or for hospitals to buy out physicians who then become salaried employees. In these uncertain times doctors cannot always sustain the former competitive private practice model with direct control of how their patients are treated both in the examination room and by the office staff.
For better or for worse, the greatest force altering the practice of medicine is electronic health records. Unbeknownst to many, electronic health records have completely eliminated any vestige of patient privacy. Dr. Hutcheon has written a commentary on the loss of patient privacy which was published in the July/August 2015 edition of the American Journal of Therapeutics. Please call the office if you would like to read this article entitled "The Government Does Not Take an Oath of Privacy."