Archives
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Strength in numbers
An adaptation of the 2015-2016 incoming president’s address
By Ajay Gupta, MD
TAFP President, 2015-2016Greetings colleagues. I am humbled and honored to serve as president of this extraordinary Academy and I want to thank all of those leaders and physicians who have mentored me and guided me along the way as well as my wonderful family for their steadfast support.
I became involved in the Texas Academy in my second year of practice because it equipped me with the tools to make my practice better. As you know, TAFP provides some of the best CME available and is produced for family physicians by family physicians. The Academy has helped me maintain board certification, which as you all are aware is an important process and not easy to do. The Academy also provides a range of practice support services to help my practice be more efficient. At our statewide meetings I get the chance to network with other family physicians to hear about the latest trends in health care delivery and payment—what’s working and what’s not working.
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Accepting the maybe
By Janet Hurley, MD
In my leadership duties for the Texas Academy of Family Physicians and within my personal job as family physician and operational chief of primary care for Trinity Mother Frances Health System, I continue to see pockets of skepticism, frustration, and fear among my primary care physician colleagues. In some of my most difficult assignments, I have felt that the greatest barrier occurs when some physicians go straight to the negative with their thoughts as we begin discussions.
Our specialty is rife with physicians that go straight to the negative. When we consider the high rates of physician burnout in our country we begin to understand why this is true. Primary care physicians have felt overworked and underpaid for quite some time. The current fee-for-service payment system has created inefficient patient management practices that prevent care for simple conditions over the phone, lead to unnecessary follow-up appointments, and encourage physicians to pack more patients into their clinic day to generate volume. Transitioning these practices to a value-based payment world is truly a challenge.
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Blue Button makes finding Medicaid patient records simple
Medicaid providers can now find their patients’ medical histories on YourTexasBenefitsCard.com. Medicaid Eligibility and Health Information Services added the Blue Button to the site in September.
Once a provider or office staff receives a client’s consent, they can log in to the site and click on the Blue Button to see and download the client’s health information. The information can then be saved as a Portable Document Format document, a Clinical Document Architecture data file, or a simple text file. Once saved, it can be imported into the provider's health management tool.
The YourTexasBenefitsCard Blue Button is assembled from client data found in the current database and claims data stored in the Medicaid Claims Administrator System. It generates easily accessible patient records on the website for providers to download, import, or print.
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