When the patient can’t afford care.

You never have to go far before finding a provider that has had a patient who could not afford their recommended treatment plan. This week we will look at Pauline W. Chen’s article When the Patient Can’t Afford the Care from the New York Times. Pauline recounts a patient encounter in which a patient couldn’t afford to change his gauze in a timely manner. Then talks about the statistics of learning about the health system in school vs just the clinical part of becoming a doctor. You may feel like in practice you have had these patients and if you had a better way to finance them that was easier you could provide them with the care they need. That is where patient payment solutions becomes involved. we take the guess work out of patient financing and can get you paid up front. Lets look at some key parts of the article:

I realized that in the busy day-to-day pursuit of becoming a good doctor, I had telescoped in on the clinical details, neglecting my once-cherished ideal to embrace the social and economic aspects of health care.

Last fall the journal Academic Medicine reported that the vast majority of students felt they had received adequate clinical training during their four years of schooling. But fewer than half felt they had had adequate exposure to health care systems and practice, an area of study that extends to subjects like medical economics, managed care, practice management and medical record-keeping.

What was surprising to the researchers was how relatively little time was required to train students in these broader health care issues. “There was a difference of maybe 16 or 17 lectures” between the two schools, said Dr. Mitesh S. Patel, lead author and a resident in the internal medicine training program at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. “But the impact on how properly people felt they were being trained was dramatic.”

That impact on students’ perceptions and the kind of care they offer is obvious to Madelon L. Finkel, a professor of clinical public health at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, who has led medical students in a required two-week intensive course on the health care system since its inception a decade ago.

“The course opens their eyes to issues they haven’t been focusing on,” Dr. Finkel said. “At the beginning, I always ask if students routinely ask their patients about drug coverage. But none of them ever does.”

In the end be the Doctor Doctor and a special thanks to Pauline Chen and the New York Times.

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