Explanation of the Medicare and Medicaid Antikickback statute and Stark Law and their restrictions on physicians' financial interests in ancillary services.
A clinical case shows how medical commercialism poses risks to patients without symptoms who get full body scans. Screening for pre-morbid disease detection is valuable if implemented correctly but calls for physician caution.
To be a useful tool for assessing quality of physician care, pay-for-performance must be designed to include process measures and to not penalize physicians for treating patients with difficult-to-manage conditions.
A physician explains that the sale of nonprescription cosmeceuticals from a dermatology office should be done in a manner that is educational but non-threatening to patients.
A physician and a lawyer argue against a dermatology clinic switching from a small, reliable pathology lab to a large-scale pathology lab in order to receive volume discounts and increase profit.
A physician responds to a previous article about the differences between using a commercial laboratory and a smaller hospital or pathology group lab for dermatological tests.
Appropriate use of the pay-for-performance system may improve quality of care by counteracting physician incentives to overtreat in fee-for-service situations or undertreat in capitation plans.
The objective is to compare the costs of providing the same level of quality. When resource-use and quality measures are juxtaposed, the resources used to provide the same level of quality can be compared.
Is it ethical for a psychiatrist to monitor a patient’s blog without the patient’s permission? If so, what information from the blog is suitable for entry in the patient’s medical record?