Dear Readers,
I’ve had a very busy week so I apologize for not putting out much content.
I do have a couple of links for you. I’ll do better next week.
This is an interview I did with Paul Batura, who broadcasts on Salem Radio Network.
https://omny.fm/shows/what-a-life-with-paul-batura/dr-edwin-leap
We discuss my work in emergency medicine and as a writer. Paul is a wonderful guy and we had a great talk.
Here’s a piece I recently wrote for MedPage Today about the process of being credentialed, that is approved to work as a physician in a particular hospital.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/rural/109244
While it’s important that we ensure that patients have qualified, ethical providers, it feels like an enormous, self-justifying industry.
This is a particular problem in medicine, but I’m sure other professions face similar battles. I’d be interested to know what sort of struggles others face. Obviously nursing. Engineering? Aviation? Drop me a note if you’re of a mind.
Have a great day!
Edwin
The whole physician credentialing business has grown out of hand. It's not about patient safety, it's about greed on the part of professional organizations. It used to be physicians satisfied a given number of review credits, called CMEs, to renew their license every year. But that's grown into having to be boarded, an expensive process which involves sometimes yearly reboarding depending upon your specialty. Then there is the addition of special credentialing for working in the ER, involving several different certifications. It's all about money, not patient safety.
My frustration when I was still working was when we would have a locums physician trying to write orders in charts and they thought they had done everything they were supposed to, but the stupid computer system would not recognize them. Or we as Patient Placement RN’s would discover that we could not enter a new hospitalist as the attending on a record for the same reason…I was constantly trying to reach our internal credentials staff, who never answered the phone and often had no clue who was I talking about…