Five Facts About Healthcare
The state of our healthcare in the United States.
Our healthcare system is a scary place. It can make you feel lost, small, and overwhelmed. There are so many different phrases to learn, acronyms to remember, and Latin words to trip us up. Making sense of the chaos quite literally takes a medical degree. But let’s be clear, most doctors don’t believe in the system as it exists today.
1. Almost 90% of medical bills have errors
Seriously, the number is actually almost 90%. I double-checked. It seems staggering to me. The situation is still so human-driven that mistakes can happen along any part of the process, from intake to coding. Technology has become available in recent months to automate some of the biggest sticking points. We could now have transcription using AI, automatic coding systems, and AI oversight that help to cull through tens of thousands of documents that no human could do in a reasonable amount of time. Medical bills will continue to have errors until we allow the machines to help. To err is human.
2. Medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the United States
What we’re saying is, those errors don’t stop at medical bills. 1 in 10 patients ask to have their medical records corrected, but what about those that don’t catch the mistake? In some cases, it can cause complications and even death. It can be as simple as height/ weight discrepancies that can cause a miss-dosage of medication and a severe reaction. Or the wrong side wrote down during pre-surgery notes that causes a less than desirable outcome. Simple and harmless or serious and deadly, these kinds of mistakes happen for many reasons, exhaustion to incompetence. One thing is for sure, patients have to point out the obvious and be okay with that. There’s a phrase in diagnostic medicine, “when you hear hoofbeats, think horses and not zebras”. In this case, patients might want to start looking for zebras laying dormant in their records.
3. 81 million American’s have more than one chronic disease
133 million Americans live with a chronic illness and over half of them deal with more than one. Often times, illness begets illness. Or the medications we’re taking does. Or we fall so out of control of our health that we are more susceptible to illnesses. And we can’t fight everything back at once. For someone in this situation, simply keeping track of the medications, appointments, side effects, and the different doctors one is seeing, it complex and time-consuming. Add in the confusion of doctors speaking Latin to tell you about what’s happening, and is why so many essentially give up. There has to be a better way for chronic illness patients to manage more than just their illness.
4. Not all doctors are paid a salary
Thinking of doctors we think nice clothes, sports cars, and beautiful homes which equate to large salaries. As of May 2018, the average doctor’s salary in the US is $228,000. Let’s stick with the most common type of doctor, a general practitioner. On average, they make $195,000 a year. Many physicians involved in practices might make a salary wage and are subject to typical performance metrics. Ever-increasing in popularity, however, is being paid on how many patients they see on a given day. Quantity over quality (though they are still subject to metrics around outcomes and satisfaction). This an emotional burden on doctors, many of whom are in their field because of a desire to help people. This forces doctors away from being caregivers and healers into production-line, sales-like roles. This is causing many to question if this model is even congruent with the oath they took.
5. The United States will see a shortage of up to nearly 122,000 physicians by 2032
A massive issue that isn’t being addressed at a high enough level, is the impending physician shortage. Because of schooling costs, plateauing wages, mounting paperwork, and a change in overall ethics, fewer people want to become a doctor. The bigger problem is quite different though. It takes four years of medical school, and at least five years of residency required to actually complete an MD. Medical schools have increased their acceptance rates by 30% in the last 20 years, but there are still not enough residency programs. Compounding these issues, and causing extreme wait times, is the increasing rates of chronic illness of the baby boomer generation. Without a growing number of students in medical school we’ll be facing a crisis in less than ten years.
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