“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”
- John Milton
It is now illegal for pediatricians in Florida to ask a parent if they have guns in the home:
In June, Gov. Rick Scott signed a law barring Florida doctors from routinely asking patients if they own a gun. The law also authorizes patients to report doctors for “unnecessarily harassing” them about gun ownership and makes it illegal to routinely document firearm ownership information in a patient’s medical record. Other state legislatures have considered similar proposals, but Florida is the first to enact such a law.
These kinds of questions, and other questions getting at the situation at home, are absolutely vital to understand a person’s health. I always asked this question. And because I was their pediatrician with whom they trusted their child’s life, the answers I got amazed me. But, now, not in Florida.
This is what happens when we let legislators dictate the practice of medicine.
Unfortunately, Medicaid has a stipulation that you must be a woman to receive coverage for breast cancer.
It seems like somebody in government wasn’t thinking very clearly when they were writing up this policy as more than 2,000 men per year are diagnosed with breast cancer.
Gizmodo Praises drchrono
Never before, at least that I know of or can imagine, has someone been paid tens of thousands of dollars to use such a sleek, professional, and just plain cool product such as the iPad 2. However, that’s just the situation that drchrono’s iPad EHR has set up for its users. Gizmodo covers the story here.
The government will pay $44,000 to people who show meaningful use of the drchrono EHR technology. That’s pretty amazing for a product that is FREE.
Tylenol’s Maximum Daily Dose Lowered
Every year, acetaminophen overdoses send 56,000 people to the emergency room, cause 26,000 hospitalizations, and take more than 450 lives from liver damage, according to the FDA.
This news has prompted Johnson & Johnson, the makers of Tylenol, to decrease the maximum daily dosage of products containing acetaminophen to 3000 mg/day. This move was made because too many people are not following the recommendations, which in part is due to so many products containing acetaminophen including cold and flu medicine, prescription medicine such as percocet, and others.
Advocates of this industry decision are hopeful that other companies will follow in Johnson & Johnson’s footsteps, and is overall a good public health effort to reduce the amount of overdoses on acetaminophen.
Putting the Future in Doctors’ Hands, Now
The first ever native iPad EHR app, drchrono, has raised $675,000 in their last round of funding to bring the world into the space of mobile health in a major way. Our team could not be happier as we set forth to revolutionize the health care industry like never before.
Of course what I’m excited about is not the industry itself, but what the meaning translates into for patients. Better health care.
