Different doses for the elderly???

A new computer warning system developed at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center warns doctors when a drug they are prescribing can hurt elderly patients because the elderly require a different dose that the doctor may not be aware of. The reason is that there is not a lot of research that focuses on the appropriate doses for the elderly and when new research comes out, doctors are often not aware of it until it is too late. Three and a half years of testing showed that doctors changed their dosage prescription 20% of the time when faced with these warnings. I am not sure this is very comforting if 80% of the doctors ignored the warning – or perhaps didn’t know what other dose to use because they hadn’t read the research. There has to be a better way.

What do you think???

waiting for your doctor :-(((

A new web site – medwaittime.com – allows doctors to input when their office appointments are running late and warn patients accordingly. So rather than waste an hour in the waiting room, the patient can come at the later time. Bravo – if it gets used. Because doctors are so pressured by HMOs to see as many patients as possible, and that they don’t have to pay for our wasted time, I suspect that they would rather see us waste the hour in the waiting room and not risk a few minutes of empty time in the middle of the day and the few minutes it would take to input the appropriate delay information to the web site. That is the problem with the perverse incentives that our health care system is faced with.

What do you think???