Nobody likes waiting to see their physician. In fact, a whopping 97% of patients are frustrated by wait times at the doctor’s office, a study has reported.1 That’s a lot of unhappy patients. Fortunately, a practice can do many things to help keep patient appointments on time—beginning with proper scheduling techniques and monitoring patients’ progress…
Computerization of healthcare in general, and medical records in particular, has opened additional areas of liability for medical practices that many may not be addressing. A data breach of patient records can have major financial and business impacts on the practice when they occur. Data Intrusions Increasing The number of data intrusions hit a record…
San Francisco is known for the Gold Rush, so it’s a particularly fitting place to collect a gold nugget. And so at the 2015 ACR/ARHP Annual Meeting in the Golden Gate City in November, the ACR and the ARHP honored a group of distinguished individuals who have made significant contributions to rheumatology research, education and…
James K. Smith, MD, believes in thinking several moves ahead. Consider your opponent. Gauge your strategy. Be aggressive when you need to be. Those are key aspects of his philosophy in rheumatology—and chess. Initiation Dr. Smith’s love of chess started after he had started his family. “I first got involved in the game through my…
Patient education has always been at the core of the nursing profession. Nurses pride themselves on being great teachers and patient advocates. When self-injectable biologics were first introduced to the market, one of the main goals was to make patients independent and put them in the driver’s seat of their own care. Yet without a…
Meet the Foundation’s incoming president, Eric L. Matteson, MD, MPH. Dr. Matteson trained in rheumatology at the University of Michigan and Mayo Graduate School of Medicine, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine. He later earned his Master of Public Health in epidemiology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Dr. Matteson currently works as the…
I want to thank you for writing the article, “Attracting More Medical Students to Rheumatology” for The Rheumatologist (online, October 2015). I am a senior at Georgetown University now, and I have recently applied to medical school. I have considered pursuing a career in rheumatology, and your article has inspired me to stay on that…
Researchers used T cell transcriptome analysis in a small-scale study, identifying gene expression of specific patient subtypes and finding that expression alteration of T cells may correlate with severity of SLE rather than its presentation…
(Reuters Health)—Burnout among U.S. doctors is becoming more common and now affects more than half of practicing physicians, according to a new study.¹ About 54% of U.S. doctors experienced at least one symptom of burnout in 2014, compared to about 46% in 2011, researchers report in Mayo Clinic Proceedings. Overall, the researchers found that doctors are…
Advocacy was front and center at the 2015 ACR/ARHP Annual Meeting, and in case you missed something, Will Harvey, MD, provides a summary here…