A culture of patient safety is prominent throughout the healthcare industry. It is quite common to find a requirement for pre-employment drug testing for all healthcare organization employees. This often encompasses employees who are involved in direct patient care, including credentialed...
According to the AMA, nearly a quarter of physicians actively practicing in the United States in 2015 were age 65 or older. In a world where longer life spans and delayed retirement have become commonplace, this statistic is not particularly shocking, but it points to a question that hospital...
Phishing emails and their viruses are used to obtain credit card numbers, usernames, passwords, and (in the case of hospitals) patient records and data. The spread of WannaCry ransomware in 2017 (which hobbled one-fifth of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service) was largely attributed to...
When the time comes to choose a medical field, primary care is often overlooked for what medical students and residents consider more glamorous specialties. Unfortunately, this can cause its true value to go ignored. By 2025, there will be a predicted primary care shortage of 12,500 to 31,100...
Last month, my column covered the evolution of peer review during the 20th century and some lessons learned from its successes and failures. To quickly summarize, the changes in medical staff structures and functions began to intertwine with a desire for better measurement of physician...
Antimicrobial stewardship is a coordinated program that promotes the appropriate use of antimicrobials (including antibiotics), improves patient outcomes, reduces microbial resistance, and decreases the spread of infections caused by multidrug-resistant organisms.
There is a declining trend in the number of family medicine (FM) physicians receiving obstetrics privileges nowadays. These providers were once responsible for the family in every aspect of its development—from a child’s conception to adulthood. Now they are more of a means to an end, a first...
“Those that forget history are condemned to repeat it.” —George Santayana
With a new year comes a strong desire to look back at the events of the past, especially as we evaluate the potential impact they can have on our future.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the medical credentialing process is incredibly long and bureaucratic, with massive amounts of repetitive paperwork going to several different agencies with different methodologies, each laboring under the impression that their means of operation is...
Privileges are the hospital organization’s way of identifying what a practitioner may do clinically at that institution. Obviously, it is important that the right privileges get matched with the right physician. This task sounds simple, but for many organizations, it is the toughest...
