Practice Improvement

Health illiteracy is widespread across all populations, but it has the extra burden of language and cultural barriers in diverse and underserved populations. Here’s how pediatricians can help.

What do patients and their families really understand about their healthcare and what can pediatricians do about it?

As 2017 winds to a close, it's time to look toward 2018 and all that it holds. We asked our editorial advisory board and you to share your resolutions for the coming year. Here's what you had to say.

It’s time for Dr. Schuman’s annual year-end review of the new tech that’s changing how pediatricians care for children. Check out his recommendations!

We’ve been asking the same basic questions in our Annual Issues and Attitudes Survey for the past 4 years and listening to your answers so that we can discern any trends in your thinking and professional behaviors. The jury is in on 2017, so here are some of the key findings. No P values here, but lots of anecdotal comments. And still some interesting feedback on what you’re confronting and juggling from patients, parents, and payments.

Medication errors are all too common in pediatric practice, whether in the hospital, home, or office. Here’s helpful advice how to avoid the hazards of pediatric prescribing and medication missteps.

It seems that our healthcare system is overdue for an integrity/honesty overhaul. Let’s review how we can begin the process of restoration at the practice and healthcare system levels.

This article will present an overview of the technology involved in scanning documents, reviewing documents, and signing documents, and provide some tips on how to expedite your document workflow.

Readers of Contemporary Pediatrics will be pleased to know that according to Merritt-Hawkins, one of the nation’s leading physician search firms, the average starting salary offered to recruit pediatricians rose from $195,000 in 2015 to $224,000 in 2016, a 15% increase. You may be curious how your current compensation as well as your compensation model compares with that of your colleagues. More importantly, there may be ways for you to earn more-or avoid a painful pay cut if your patient visits are dwindling.

This article describes how a mobile application, a “web widget,” and an office triage support tool can expedite and improve your existing office triage capabilities.

One physician says the time to protest MOC mandates is now.

With the introduction of point-of-care (POC) molecular assays, pediatricians can diagnosis influenza A and B during the office visit with sensitivity and specificity comparable to reference assays.

My clinic is restructuring its physician compensation model, which has led to much consternation among my colleagues.

It’s been over a year since the American Board of Pediatrics (ABP) announced its intentions to overhaul the maintenance of certification (MOC) process. In this reportorial article, Dr. Andrew Schuman brings you up-to-date with current MOC requirements and the changes likely to occur over the next year.

Many years ago, when my now-grown children were babies, we had the bare necessities for raising our young ones. Cloth diapers and diaper pins, plastic bottles and NUK nipples, and the all-important windup baby swing. Now decades later, parents have an assortment of high-tech gadgets to help raise their newborns.

I began the January 2016 Peds v2.0 article “Expediting medical documentation” by stating that my “theme” for this year’s articles is the “retaking” of pediatric practice for ourselves and our patients. I continue this discussion by borrowing a slogan from one of our presidential candidates, in the hopes that pediatricians can be motivated to implement needed reforms that will make practices more efficient, improve the care we provide to patients, and enhance the lives of pediatric providers.

When I opened my first practice in 1986, I was intrigued by an advertisement in Contemporary Pediatrics that caught my attention, and days later I was the proud owner of a FirstTemp tympanic thermometer.

To continue our ongoing theme of “taking back” the practice of pediatrics for ourselves and our patients, I’d like to discuss utilizing behavior portals to facilitate the diagnosis of patients with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), developmental delay, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), as well as depression and anxiety.

Let’s begin our recovery of medical practice by discussing alternative ways of documenting office visits.

In this article, I describe my experience visiting vendors in the NCE’s exhibit hall and detail some of the best tech presented at this year’s workshops.

Physicians and parents are using a variety of health-related gadgets and gizmos that communicate with our smartphones and tablets. These range from fitness devices that monitor daily exercise, to glucometers used by diabetics to monitor sugar levels, to sphygmomanometers used to measure blood pressure.

Barring a last minute reprieve, International Classification of Diseases version 10 (ICD-10) diagnostic coding went into effect the first of this month. If you read my March 2015, Peds v2.0 article on ICD-10 adoption-and heeded the advice contained therein-you have successfully implemented ICD-10, and everything is going smoothly now.

Contemporary Pediatrics brings you 10 tips to make the switch to the ICD-10 coding system.

When I started my pediatric practice in 1986, we tested patients for strep throat by performing a throat culture, which was placed in a small office incubator for 48 hours. Typically, we put patients on an antibiotic pending culture results and would stop antibiotics if the culture proved negative. In my first year of practice, an interesting new technology arrived-rapid antigen detection tests (RADTs). These tests were reasonably accurate and enabled us to make a diagnosis at the time of the visit.