While talking to my dermo a couple of weeks ago, I was told that since they are being forced to upgrade/digitize just about everything there would be less hours available for actually seeing and treating patients. Appointments would be more scarce and patient time would be shorter. Sounds like a good idear to me. NOT!
That’s just the beginning. No one’s checking and reporting on the decline in med students. who would go into medicine?
No, there will be a scarcity in medical care that will bear many results.
Yes. It is mandated by the government. There are significant penalties for not ‘upgrading’ to a fully electronic medical record. A big hunk of the time in the office now is spent at a computer, clicking off mandatory ‘boxes’ (e.g. “I reviewed the social history”), and not actually face to face interaction with the patient. It's a nightmare.
Only to point this out...because the US media won’t touch the story. Over the past six months...there’s been this mess openly discussed in Germany over public hospitals losing money.
After decades of having the local states fund the maintenance, repair and new construction of hospitals throughout Germany (public, not private)....the trend was halted in the last year because the states just don’t have the money anymore to do so, and there was no law dictating they had to do it.
Well...the hospitals are at a loss to move ahead with any plan on taking care of what they have. The people who control the purse strings of the national healthcare funds...have decided to hand out a one-time ‘bonus’ of one billion dollars. It’s enough to buy everyone about a year of time before the true answer emerges.
What the public is grasping in Germany...is that around sixty percent of all German public hospitals are unable to sustain themselves. The solution? So far, it’s believed that if they take out roughly 1/3 of all public hospitals...the remaining ones might be able to survive. So if you lived within ten minutes of a current hospital....you might find yourself in a new position in four years....where the nearest hospital is forty minutes away. A decade from now....maybe even sixty minutes away by car.
No matter how we all think of things....medicine is now a business, and cost will end up being the bottom line.