ER Docs as Primary Care Physicians By Dr. Evelyn Higgins

Picture this scene with me if you will for one minute because it just might affect you. You are rushed to the hospital due to chest pain, an obvious emergency situation where you are literally facing life or death due to a heart attack. You get to the ER and cannot be treated in time due to the lack of beds available because a bed was actually taken by a "fake patient" - a patient who is there to see how the doctor and staff do their job. Sounds like an overcrowded urban facility, and sounds like it is an impossible scenario. Well at this point, it is all fictional but may soon become a reality for us all, not just due to the situation of patients using the ER doctor as a primary care physician, but there is actually an ethics committee for the American Medical Association that is pressing for "undercover patients" to evaluate doctors and their staff. Such a situation could have disastrous consequences as doctors and hospitals are currently overburdened to begin with. We are faced with a system that wants to spy on the physicians and judge their performance at a time when physicians are working harder with more hoops to jump through due to a healthcare system that has more middlemen than actual doctors. Just try to have a procedure approved and you will see exactly what I am writing about. [more..]