Which of the following events is most traumatic for a practicing physician? Your staff doesn’t show up because the roads are flooded, but the waiting room is full of patients. Medicare notifies you that coding discrepancies will result in an audit of 2 years of Medicare records. You receive an offer of employment by a corporate medical institution who will bury your practice if you do not sign. Your key expert witness defending you in your upcoming medical malpractice case is incarcerated. Your office electronic medical records (EMR) system suffers a cardiac arrest. Tough choices, I know. Our office lost complete access to EMR for 3 days, and it wasn’t pretty. I don’t grasp the technical (doubletalk) explanation for the temporary EMR coma, but we were reminded of how dependent we are on technology. Our IT gurus were working tirelessly, but their adversary was wily and formidable. Finally, they prevailed, but I wouldn’t regard this as a clean win for us. We were hobbling for 3 d
MD Whistleblower presents vignettes and commentaries on the medical profession. We peek 'behind the medical curtain' and deliver candor and controversy in every post.