01/14/2015    Ron Freireich, DPM

Half of Docs May Not Attest to Stage 2 MU in 2015

This past weekend, I finished reading “The One
Thing” by Gary Keller. In Chapter 17, The Four
Thieves, he describes The Four Thieves of
Productivity, the fourth one being Environment
Doesn't Support Your Goals. He defines Your
Environment as “who you see and what you
experience everyday.” He further states “Anyone
and anything at anytime can become a thief,
diverting your attention away from your most
important work and stealing your productivity
right from under your nose.”

CMS and private insurances companies are diverting
our attention away from our most important work,
which we have trained long and hard for, that is
taking care of our patients. PQRS, Medicare
penalties, insurance denials, HIPAA audits,
Medicare audits, Meaningful Use, EMR, ICD-10 (and
there will be more, CMS is so out of control), are
stealing our productivity.

Our national associations (MD, DPM, and DO) as
well as large hospital institutions across the
country, large organizations that have large
numbers of members that belong to them, have
failed us as physicians (their members) and failed
our patients miserably by allowing this to happen.
The systems that have been put into place, PQRS,
Meaningful Use, etc. are making practicing
medicine unmanageable. Instead of developing
manageable systems to improve medicine, they have
created a runaway train that now cannot be
stopped.

We as individual physicians cannot change any of
this. We need to rely on large groups of
physicians, i.e. our national associations and
hospital systems to take the lead in creating
positive meaningful change, not our government and
private insurance companies. If we continue down
this path, medicine as we know it will continue to
circle the drain.

Ron Freireich, DPM, Cleveland, OH

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