Pathfinder's Blog Posts

Healthcare Directives and Planning The call came late on a Thursday. The husband of a long married couple had suffered a stroke 2 weeks earlier. He had lost the ability to swallow and the doctor at the hospital had urged surgery to place a feeding tube directly to his stomach before transferring him to a […]

Health care bills have mistakes, sometimes lots of them. The figure most often quoted is that up to 80% of medical bills have errors. I’ve looked for the original source of that statement without success, but I did find one medical bill review company, Medical Billing Advocates of America, who noted that in their practice […]

Health insurance is complicated and healthcare costs a lot. If you’re not up for a complicated read, here’s the short version: Don’t use out of network providers if you can avoid it. If you think healthcare is expensive, out of network healthcare is very expensive! But if you want to dig a bit deeper, read […]

Anymore, it seems for most of us every medical bill has a surprise when we first open the envelope! How does a provider (doctor, hospital, laboratory, imaging center) decide how much healthcare costs? It’s a pretty closely guarded secret, and it’s not uniform across providers. But suffice it to say, it definitely requires some serious […]

What is “quality” in healthcare?   It turns out it depends on who you ask.   Doctors tend to view quality from a technical perspective – accuracy of a diagnosis, appropriateness of the treatment, and the outcome for the patient. Payers (which includes Medicare and Medicaid, and commercial insurance) tend to focus on evidence-based medicine […]

Huh? Although medical care has certainly become incredibly specialized, whenever I’ve suggested that a client consider asking for a palliative care consult, the first response is “What’s that?” or a close second “I’m not dying, why would I want that??” In our current environment in many cases palliative care and hospice are often provided as […]