Like a recurring bad dream, it’s health insurance open enrollment again. Whether you have your health insurance through your employer, from healthcare.gov, or Medicare, no doubt your mailbox has been full of notifications with changes to your plan, or solicitations to new options. When I ask people about this, most say they file them in …
How many stars would *you* get? I’ll never forget the first time I took an Uber. I got a text alert seconds after I got out of the car. “How was your drive? Rate your driver!” How cool is that, I thought – I get to give almost immediate feedback on my experience! But …
Imagine you’ve been experiencing some physical symptoms that don’t seem normal to you. At first you ignored them, but when they didn’t go away, you logged on to your favorite browser and plugged in a few terms. A long list of pages comes up, and you start clicking away to try to figure out what …
The calls come pretty routinely. “My mom has long-term care insurance and it’s time for her to have help. I’ve called five agencies, and they all tell me they don’t have any available caregivers now. We promised her she could stay at home, and she bought insurance to make sure of that. Now we can’t …
Kevin* is fortunate to have health insurance through his job with a local construction company. Like most of us, he didn’t look very carefully at his options; he’s 34, generally healthy, and chose the plan with the lowest monthly cost. He makes about $35,000 a year, enough to keep the wolves away, but not enough …
When I walked into the hospital lobby to visit my friend, I wasn’t sure that I hadn’t arrived in a posh hotel. The marble floors gleamed, and the atrium was filled with plants that made it feel like I’d wandered into a specialty greenhouse. Her room was decorated in matched and muted colors, the hospital …
Can Looks Be Deceiving? (Or….what’s up with that hospital survey?) Read More »
With the advent of really good inventory management, we’ve been trained to wait to buy things until when we need them – just in time. However when inventory is managed so tightly, it’s a bit of a dance when demand picks up. (Think toilet paper). As a consequence many of us have begun to think …
I remember vividly the first time I used Skype in my work life to communicate with a colleague at a distance. While it was kinda cool to be able to see him, the video was jerky with weird delays, and I felt like I had to keep repeating myself, or asking him to, as the …
Next Best Thing to Being There…or is it? (Some musings on telemedicine) Read More »
As a patient/health advocate, a common call is “I need to find a doctor. Who’s the best for _________ (fill in the blank?)” Should be a simple question, right? Dictionary.com defines “best” as: “of the highest quality or standing: the best work, the best students; or “the most advantageous, suitable, or desirable: the best way. …
This was the title of a Time magazine piece by Haley Edwards a few years back that included a profile of a case in our practice. The article came to mind through a recent personal experience I wanted to share. Seven weeks ago I sustained a catastrophic plumbing accident in my home, a condo I …