Contents tagged with young

  • A new way to train family physicians

    Tags: young, residency, perspective, rural medicine, rural, rural physician

    Friday, June 5, 2015 10:45:04 AM
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    By Richard Young, MD

    What is the best way to train comprehensive full-service family physicians to learn how to thrive in underserved rural Texas? How have duty hour restrictions affected residents’ training with this goal in mind?  JPS might have some answers.

    The John Peter Smith Hospital Family Medicine Residency Program was chosen to be one of 14 programs to participate in the Preparing the Personal Physician Practice (P4) experiment, which was conducted from 2007 to 2012. The leading organizations that regulate family medicine residencies allowed JPS and 13 other programs across the U.S. to blow up their curricula and start all over. JPS innovated its curriculum in two primary ways. This is a report on some of our preliminary results.

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  • A better way to value family physicians’ work

    Tags: young, perspective, coding, billing, value

    Sunday, December 1, 2013 12:37:00 PM
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    By Richard Young, M.D.

    Ms. M was a 68-year-old Hispanic female who had not seen Dr. Smith (not his real name) in nearly a year. She had run out of her diabetes, high blood pressure, and cholesterol medications months before.

    Ms. M had other concerns in addition to these three chronic diseases and the practical difficulties she faced filling her prescriptions. She asked Dr. Smith to help her with her foot pain and knee pain. She was told by another doctor at an ER that she had visited for a non-urgent problem a few months prior that her blood potassium level was low. She expected Dr. Smith to address her heartburn, recent weight gain, bad teeth, and an additional but distinctly different abdominal pain. She wanted a test for her kidney function, for which Dr. Smith had to spend a couple of minutes trying to figure out why she was concerned about her kidneys in the first place and the results of blood tests at other facilities such as her recent ER visit. Dr. Smith also spent several minutes explaining the need and importance of osteoporosis screening, which she ultimately declined.

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  • By choosing wisely, physicians can help address the unsustainable trajectory of health care costs

    Tags: perspective, young, choosing wisely, health care costs, aafp

    Monday, July 30, 2012 8:59:48 AM
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    By Richard Young, M.D.

    “Every admitted patient should have a chest X-ray and a VDRL,” said one of my Type A personality internal medicine attending physicians during residency. The year was 1990 and this attitude was shared by a few other knowledgeable physicians at the time, though others questioned the practice and were more flexible in their medical decision-making. I would venture to guess that few family physicians or internists practice this way in 2012, but the practice is not completely dead.

    A lot has changed since 1990. The total cost of U.S. health care was $724 billion and consumed 12.5 percent of the gross domestic product.1 In 2012, the total cost of U.S. health care is estimated to be $2.8 trillion and will consume 17.6 percent of GDP.2 This health care inflationary trend has continued unabated for the last 50 years.

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