Posts Tagged ‘shortage’

Shortage of Primary Care Physicians in Massachusetts

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

Today’s Wall St Journal has an editorial entitled, “The Failure of RomneyCare”.  It contains some fascinating statistics about , the average physician availability in the Bay State.  In fact, the Massachusetts Medical Society refers to the situation as a “critical shortage” of primary care physicians.  “56% of Massachusetts internal medicine physicians no longer are accepting new patients according to a 2009 physician work-force study conducted by the Massachusetts Medical Society.  For new patients who do get an appointment with a primary-care doctor, the waiting time is 44 days… ”

Dr. Sandra Schneider, the vice president of the American College of Emergency Physicians, told the Boston Globe last April,  “Just because you have insurance doesn’t mean there’s a physician who can see you.”

Once again the issues are pretty clear.  Our ongoing medical issues are centered on access and cost containment.

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Posted in Access to Care, Emergency Room, Health Care Reform, primary care | Comments Off

Modernizing health care delivery

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

For those that remember Watergate, you may recall the quote from Woodward and Bernstein’s source, Deep Throat: “Follow the money”.  Like so many other things in our society, much can be revealed by following the economic trail and motivations that the system provides.  Let’s take one simple example.

Perhaps you have had a sore throat before.  You call your primary care physician and he can get you an appointment- next Thursday.  His calendar is already full, and this makes sense because he is economically enticed to see as many patients as possible during a work day.  Your next stop is the Urgent Care center.  This avenue is available immediately, but when you arrive, the wait time is 4 hours.  They tell you 2 hours at the desk, but we all know how that goes. (more…)

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Posted in Access to Care, Health Care Costs, New Technology, Telemedicine | Comments Off

Hot off the press!

Friday, January 15th, 2010

January 15, 2010 / The Association of American Medical Colleges has estimated that due to population growth, aging and other factors, the country is facing a potential shortage of 159,000 primary care physicians by 2025. Telemedicine technologies help scarce healthcare professionals reach the widest patient population most efficiently.  This number rose from earlier projections of a 40,000 shortage by 2020.   Unfortunately, that’s about the time I’m really going to need to see my doctor.

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Posted in Access to Care, Health Care Costs, Health Care Reform, Telemedicine | Comments Off

Doctor Shortage

Friday, January 15th, 2010

I’m a bit of a telemedicine information junkie.  What I am reading suggests that we are facing a huge shortage of primary care doctors.  The numbers are pretty consistent and seem to indicate that we will have a shortage of 40,000 primary care physicians in the next 10 years.  If only 32% of our doctors are now primary care and if healthcare reform passes and we add another 40 million people or so to the system how can this possibly work????  This would seem to add tremendous credibility to telemedicine technology solutions.

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Posted in Access to Care, Health Care Reform | 2 Comments »