STAMFORD, CN – Cost issues, affecting both patients and their practices, are buffeting physicians’ perceptions of the practice of medicine.
A recently released survey by Thomson Healthcare revealed wide physician concern about a variety of divergent issues, ranging from malpractice insurance to rising healthcare insurance costs overall.
While the issues that worry physicians don’t always match up with the factors that actually have more influence with healthcare delivery, their concerns need to be addressed before substantial system change can occur, said Kaveh Safavi, MD, chief medical officer for Thomson Healthcare.
For example, nine of 10 physicians say they believe rising malpractice insurance costs have had a negative impact on the practice of medicine in the past decade. But when asked to identify the most common cause of medical mistakes, physicians reported miscommunication between doctor and patient.
Safavi said studies have pointed to other reasons for medical mistakes, many of them more significant than physician-patient miscommunication. But dealing with the communication issue will be important if doctors are to get on board with improvement efforts, he added.
Patients’ failure to follow treatment therapies was cited as a major frustration, and physicians most often blamed the high cost of treatment as the reason why patients don’t follow through with their treatments.
The high cost of health insurance was rated as highly as malpractice by frustrated physicians, the study reported. Practices feel that impact in different ways, Safavi said – first as providers of care, resulting in patients paying more out of pocket or perhaps dropping insurance, and then as employers having to offer healthcare coverage to workers.
“Physicians have a history of being a poor provider of benefits,” he said. “If they don’t provide (health insurance), they can’t attract nurses away from hospitals” to work in their practices.
Two-thirds of the 1,656 physician respondents also have a negative perception of direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising. On the plus side, 90 percent saw advances in information technology for physicians and pharmaceutical development as postive factors influencing healthcare in the past decade.