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Sherif Khattab, MD, is Founder and CEO of Direct Health Delivery (DHD), which advocates a more direct interaction between a patient and their physician – in order to alleviate bottlenecks that undermine the patient-physician relationship and inflate the price of care. Sherif has been at the helm of DHD since 2014 and is also Founder and Medical Director of Ocean Surgery Center, a state-of-the-art, multispecialty outpatient surgery center credentialed by the State of California and CMS since 2006. DHD provides price transparency – an upfront disclosure of the predictable costs related to treatment and care. DHD’s business solution involves forming a nationwide panel of providers who: 1) will care for the workforce of the self-insured, and 2) will do so transparently. Sherif is a Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeon with 30+ years of clinical experience and 20 years as the owner and medical director of a multi-specialty surgery center in LA. He co-founded an IPA with less than 100 physicians; together they achieved and maintained quadruple aim status for more than two decades. The same IPA was later acquired by Optum Rx, the second largest HMO in Southern California. Earlier, Sherif oversaw the Burn Unit at USC Medical Center (LA County), and was Chief of Plastic Surgery at both Torrance Memorial Medical Center, and Little Company of Mary Hospital. Sherif has joined the Los Angeles Round Table.

Mimi Grant’s Blog Post:  Three Antidotes to Physicians’ IT Headaches

While preparing this week’s ABL Healthcare Online, several horror stories impacting physicians jumped out at me. All of them piling on as to why a 2014 survey concluded that America’s “burned-out doctors made up 54 percent of the profession.” Yet, it struck me that over the past few years, in our Healthcare Round Tables, we’ve discussed most of these problems – and their solutions. So here are just three of them – as it happens, they all involved IT:

First – Dealing with EHRs.
It’s gotten so bad that there’s a new Twitter account, @EPICEMRparody, channeled by a doc for docs, which has more than 13,000 followers in just over a month. Truly, if you’re looking for a good laugh, you’ve really got to read it. Yet, even though the august Dr. Atul Gawande offered plenty of reasons “Why Doctors Hate Their Computers” in The New Yorker last November, he also suggested there are several silver linings in that electronic cloud.

As Gregg Meyer, the chief clinical officer at Partners HealthCare said, “We think of this as a system for us and it’s not. It is for the patients.” Turns out that the patients – about ten times as many as the nearly 60,000 clinical users at Partners [that’s over half million of them] – love the ability to look up their lab results, remind themselves of medications they’re supposed to take, and read their doctor’s office notes to better understand what they’ve been told. In fact, one of the comments on the @EPICEMRparody feed was from a patient basically saying just that… CLICK TO READ REST OF BLOG [PHOTO CREDIT: @EPICEMRparody]

UPCOMING ABL HEALTHCARE ROUND TABLES

• • • • 5/14 – Silicon Valley Round Table
      • 5/17 – Los Angeles Round Table
      • 6/05 – Orange County Round Table
      • 6/12 – San Francisco Round Table
      • 6/14 – East Bay Round Table

HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY NEWS & TRENDS

• • • FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
      • • “Medicare For All” Gets Much-Awaited CBO Report
        • Trump Administration Files Formal Request to Strike Down All of ACA, AND Seeks to Redefine Formula for Calculating Poverty
        • Tennessee to Test CMS’ Willingness to Block-Grant Medicaid

      CALIFORNIA GOVERNMENT

      • • Santa Clara County OKs $325M in Bonds to Finance Hospital Purchases & Upgrades
        • 4 Counties Balk at Newsom’s Plan to Cover Immigrants

      INTERNATIONAL HEALTHCARE

      • • Canada Single-Payer Approach vs. Insurer-Based Systems in Germany, Netherlands & Switzerland

      HOSPITALS, SYSTEMS & MED GROUPS

      • • “The Providers” PBS Documentary: Highly Recommended and Viewable Here
        • Visits to NPs & PAs Spike 129%; Primary Care Office Visits Decline 18%

      THE INTERNET, TELECOM & HEALTHCARE

      • • Seven Ways Health Consumers are Tracking Their Sleep
        • Facebook Announces New Steps to Bolster Privacy of Health Data
        • Global Medical App Downloads Exceeded 400 Million in 2018
        • Joint Telehealth, In-Person Behavioral Health Appointments Decreased Time to Care, Increased Utilization
        • World Health Organization Releases Guidelines for Digital Health Adoption
        • Oscar Health Teams with Cardiogram to Give Members Health Detection Tech
        • Big Money Still Pouring Into Digital Health

      MEDTECH & BIOTECH BREAKTHROUGHS

      • • Machine Learning Already Accelerating Drug Development

      OPIOID CRISIS

      • • The Giants at the Heart of the Opioid Crisis

      CONSUMERISM OF HEALTHCARE

      • How the Consumerization of Healthcare is Changing the Industry
      • Meeting the Challenges of Value-Based Care in Age of Consumerism

Click Here to Read All of These News Items & More or Click on Specific Headlines Above to Read Specific Articles