How has medicine changed in the last 30 or 40 years?
circa 1950
circa 2000
circa 2015
Just in the last decade medicine has changed a lot. For instance, by the end of the year approximately 90% of office-based physicians nationwide will be using electronic health records (EHRs).
The doctors: Over 100 years of collective experience
- Barbara Bergin, MD, is an orthopedic surgeon at Texas Orthopedics and has been a doctor for 31 years. I highly recommend you check out Bergin’s blog, where she offers tips on keeping your joints healthy using conversational language, humor, and personal anecdotes.
- Damien Howell, PT, DPT, OCS, is a physical therapist at Damien Howell Physical Therapy, and has been practicing for more than 40 years. Howell also blogs. “I started that webpage in 2003 before blogs existed,” he says with a laugh.
- John Errol Asher, MD, is a board-certified infectious disease physician and internist, who began practicing more than 40 years ago before retiring this year.
As a senior retired ophthalmologist I have witnessed most of these changes. In 1962 when I was a junior medical school student Medicare came into existence.
The reference article focuses on the electronic health care record, which is too narrow a focus on changes over the last 49 years.
Perhaps the most annoying aspects of change have been the growth and interference with doctor and patient choices for treatments requiring authorizations for payment of claims. This interference is perhaps the one greatest change in health care. This is the result of increasing costs, yet health care costs continue to increase.
Recently increasing regulations and CMS rules have been found to increase costs offsetting any possible reductions in health care cost.
In an effort to decrease overhead, many physicians have created group medical practice business structure, in an effort to build an organization with greater negotiating power, and to reduce overhead. The former may be valid, the latter is in doubt.
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