Articles related to All Specialties

The $1.7 trillion spending bill signed by the president dramatically mitigates the expected cuts in Medicare payments. But any cut will still put an untenable strain on specialties like family medicine.

The amount owed on medical student loans keeps growing. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, the average debt held by 2019 graduates, which includes loans for both medical school and undergraduate study, is a staggering $201,490. In 1978, the average debt for medical school was $13,500, which is equivalent to $54,000 now.

The new proposed rules are being cheered by caregivers and are in response to complaints from patients and providers that the PA process is often burdensome, disruptive to care, delaying care, costly, and a major source of frustration and burnout for providers.

Many prior studies associated enrollment in Medicare Advantage with lower use of health care services, greater performance of recommended preventive services, and higher scores for some measures of patient experience. This and other studies over the last decade suggest that “the association between Medicare Advantage and higher quality of care is modest at best.”

Over the past ten years, there has been a significant amount of consolidation in the EHR sector. Over a decade ago, there were over 1,000 EHR vendors, according to KLAS Research. That number had fallen to about 400 as late as 2019. According to an examination of EHR purchasing activities that took place in 2021, Becker’s Hospital Review recently compiled a list of the top EHR platforms, sorted by share of the US hospital market.

Medicare cuts will complicate the lives and precarious health circumstances of the millions of Americans who depend on it while undermining the quality of care for numerous diseases. As a result, the 4.5% reduction to therapy providers under the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule in 2023 is causing great worry among seniors and healthcare professionals countrywide. The physical and occupational therapy professions would see reductions of about 9% by 2024 if this cut were to go into effect.