Creative Health Labs

There is a wonderful TED talk by Shawn Achor in which he explains that most people have the success and happiness equation backwards. Whereas most people believe achieving greater success will result in more happiness, he argues that being a happier person will make you much more successful. He goes on to say that happier and less stressed doctors are 19% faster and more accurate in diagnosing patients.

Medicare just recently published additional public data about what physicians received in fee-for-service payments from Medicare in 2014. Being an Emergency Medicine physician, I was naturally curious about this data and what information I could glean about our specialty. The first thing I did was to download the data from Medicare , and I extracted only those providers who are in Emergency Medicine. For EM providers, Medicare publishes for how many cases of levels 3, 4, 5 and critical care ("CC") each provider was reimbursed. These are represented by 99283, 99284, 99285, and 99291. Critical care, 99291, is a very interesting one because it is up to the doctor's judgement (more so than the other codes which have very strict criteria) as to whether a case qualifies for critical care. There are, of course, guidelines, but still, it's mostly a judgement call and the physician is expected to write a brief explanation as to why the case qualifies. Critical care, of co...

In my recent article in Emergency Medicine News, titled " The Most Solvable Cause of Medical Error ," I explain how a "Slack for Hospitals" would greatly reduce interruptions in the hospital environment, and thus (hopefully) reduce medical errors. In the article I explain the reason that such a high number of interruptions occur in the hospital workflow (because there is almost no asynchronous communication system), and how frequent interruptions have been directly linked to a high rate of medical errors. Add this fact to the recent news that medical errors now make up third leading cause of death in the U.S. Tech entrepreneurs who don't know or understand the real issues in healthcare often make the naive assumption that  diagnosis  is the major challenge in healthcare.

I am excited to announce that we have relaunched Jobmap.io - healthcare jobs on an interactive map with additional useful resources like median income for the zipcode and school rankings, essentially like a "Redfin for healthcare jobs." We will be launching some cool new services within jobmap soon, including 1-click employment contract review for physicians, APPs, and other healthcare providers.