Thinking Through the Cost of Childbirth
Dr. Lauren Demosthenes is an assistant professor of clinical ob/gyn at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine – Greenville. I had lunch with my old college roommate last week She’s a new grandmother and was telling me about her daughter who lives in another state. Her daughter is self pay because she and her husband own a restaurant and have opted out of insurance due to the cost. She received her hospital bill in the mail and she was surprised at the cost of some of the items. As she looked through her bill, she saw some items that she wasn’t even aware that she...
Read MoreWhy Residents Are Vital To Successful High-Value Education Projects
Christopher Moriates, MD is a Clinical Instructor in the Division of Hospital Medicine at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). He is currently Co-Chair of the UCSF DHM High Value Care committee. During residency training he co-created a cost awareness curriculum for residents at UCSF. I learned a lot of medicine during residency, but perhaps I actually learned even more about how to just get things done in a hospital. If you wanted a right-upper-quadrant ultrasound done for our patient, I was your man. I had a complicated series of unwritten algorithmic flow diagrams in my...
Read MoreMore is Not Always Better
Dr. Robert Dickman is the founding Jaharis Chair of Family Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine More than 40 years ago as a third year medical student, I recall the Chief of Medicine praising a fellow student for his rare diagnosis of paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria in a patient who had presented with the common symptom of “painless hematuria”. The lesson was not lost on any of us: good medicine means an expansive differential diagnosis and an even longer list of tests (including expensive ones) to “rule them out”. “More is better” and “being complete” while...
Read MoreTeaching Residents about Costs: The Price is Right
It all started while out to dinner with a couple of my fellow Brigham/Massachusetts General Hospital OB/Gyn residents. We were discussing our favorite old TV shows and one fellow resident’s love of The Price Is Right with Bob Barker. After talking about the game show, a light bulb went off in my head and I thought, “Why can’t we play The Price is Right with hospital charges to our patients?” With further discussion we realized that none of us knew the hospital charge, or the cost to our patients for routine workups we routinely order in our gynecology clinic. We really...
Read More
Last Tweets
Recent Comments