Staff News Writer

By applying principles of business organizational change to medical schools, faculty at some of the schools participating in the AMA’s Accelerating Change in Education consortium are seeking to measure schools’ readiness for change and ways to ensure changes can be maintained over time.

Today’s medical students—and tomorrow’s physicians—have a vast amount of information available to them, and teaching them to sort through the good information and use it appropriately is a challenge medical educators are working to solve.

In North Jersey Brain and Spine Center v. Aetna, a physician practice that received assignments of benefits from patients with employer-sponsored health plans sued the insurer for denying and underpaying medically necessary surgeries for three different patients.

Medical students and residents who report higher levels of pharmaceutical marketing interactions were more likely to prescribe brand name drugs and less likely to rely on evidence-based treatment options, according to a study in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Treatment, not stigmatization, should be the priority for addressing substance abuse, AMA Board of Trustees Member Mary Anne McCaffree, MD, told state legislators.

Personally identified data about physicians not publicly available soon could be shared with government agencies, law enforcement and Medicare contractors without physicians’ knowledge, under a new “system of records” announced by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

While actual payment rates for Medicare services are limited by congressional budget games, the relative values assigned to those services are carefully weighed based on the resources required to provide each service. You might be surprised about who can provide input to shape those values.