HEALTHY ONLINE

Everybody has a shadow. Although as a small child you may have tried, you cannot separate yourself from your shadow no matter what you do. Electronic medical records may be the first tiny step on the road to attaching yet another indivisible part to your persona, a “panoramic, high-definition, relatively comprehensive view of a patient that doctors can use to assess and manage disease”, and this, in the words of Dr. Eric Topol , is the “essence of digitizing a human being”. Dr. Abraham Verghese , named this digitized entity iPatient and expressed concern that the “iPatient threatens to become the real focus of our attention, while the real patient in the bed often feels neglected, a mere placeholder for the virtual record”. Whether you share Dr. Topol’s enthusiasm or Dr. Verghese’s worries, or experience a combination of both, your medical digital self, has been born. And nurtured by leaps and bounds in technology, it will soon grow to loom as large as your shadow at sunset. Today’s el...

If you are like most physicians in this country, you probably bought yourself an EHR, either recently or a while back. If you are like the docs quoted on the various EHR vendor websites, you took to it like fish to water and are thoroughly enjoying your new computerized system. If you are like most other physicians, you are slugging your way through, a bit slower than usual, with a bit less money in your wallet, either hopeful that things will get better or perhaps still hopeful that this is just a bad dream. If you are like most EHR users, you probably compromised on an EHR that seemed to be not as bad as the others, compromised with the documentation style seemingly imposed by your EHR and are now dragging a tablet from exam room to exam room, and that tablet gets awfully heavy after a few hours of seeing patients. Perhaps you found nifty little ways to “cheat” and leave the tablet in your office, or maybe you broke down and installed desktops in your exam rooms, or perhaps you tried...

When the hypothetical naked, unconscious and alone patient presents at your ER with no immediately evident reasons for his distress and presumably holding his driver license between his clenched teeth, would you find it helpful if you could see a nicely typed, or hand written, list of diagnoses and current medications for this hapless person? When a family moves across the country and brings in their eight year old for her first visit with the new pediatrician, would it be helpful to see a slightly fuzzy image of her immunizations list from back home? When an elderly patient you’ve been seeing for umpteen years is shipped to the hospital in the middle of the night, would it be helpful to find the admission record in your to-do list for today?                                          ...

On Thursday, June 28, 2012, the Supreme Court of the United States decided that requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance from a private corporation, or suffer a penalty, is an unconstitutional exercise of Congressional power, but if you stare at the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) for long enough, at a certain angle, in a certain light, you can see a tax form, materializing above the viewable details of the act. Since Congress has plenty of latitude on taxing schemes, the health insurance tax, previously known as the individual mandate, was left standing as is. This great innovation from Chief Justice Roberts was hailed as “ A Marbury for our time ”, referring to the landmark case of 1803 where Chief Justice Marshall asserted the right of the Court to invalidate acts of Congress if judicial review concluded that the acts are unconstitutional. The Roberts Court of 2012 is expanding the definition of judicial review from the review of actual acts of Cong...