While I've generally been of an optimistic wait-and-see approach to the recently enacted health care reform legislation, I have been concerned to note that a fair amount of it seems optimized to large medical organizations.For example, the billions to be spent to create incentives for doctors to use electronic medical records (EMR) does nothing to require uniform code standards so that various EMR products would still be able to communicate and share data with each other. I hesitate to spend up to $40,000 in start-up costs alone, only to find that my EMR system can't share data with other offices or hospitals.
Also, the use of medical practice data for statistics gathering is not useful in small office practices because of the smaller number of patients. This really presupposes medical groups with tens of thousands of patients like Kaiser or the VA.
This article reports on a meeting with two White House officials basically stating that doctors should get ready to enjoy a life in Big Medicine. Frankly, if I enjoyed working for Kaiser or the VA, I'd already be doing that.
I do find it unfortunate that the present administration's approach to stimulating businesses and propping up banks similarly seems to almost solely be directed to enterprise-scale businesses and large banks and not the small "mom and pop" businesses and local credit unions.
As far as I'm concerned, entrepreneurship is what makes America great!
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