Episode 133: Building an Electronic Health Record That Won't Make You Pull Your Hair Out with Dr. Richard Sztramko
The Paradocs Podcast with Eric Larson
Release Date: 06/17/2021
Episode 154: Rethinking Vaccine Mandates and the Omicron Variant with Dr. Monica Gandhi
The Paradocs Podcast with Eric Larson
Vaccine mandates, mask mandates, boosters, and variants have been a constant source of debate and controversy with the pandemic. My guest today is Dr. Monica Gandhi, an expert in immunology and infectious disease who runs the HIV clinic at UCSF. She has been a fairly prominent voice in support of the mask and vaccine mandates in her home state of California and city of San Francisco. She returns from her visit in June for SARS-CoV-2 in which she guessed that it wouldn't evade the vaccine or prior infection (spoiler alert: she was right). Do Vaccine Mandates Make Sense? Dr. Gandhi is...
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Episode 153: Crowd Health is Go Fund Me for Health Care on Nitro with CEO Andy Schoonover
The Paradocs Podcast with Eric Larson
What happens when you take Go Fund Me and put it into an ecosystem of likeminded folks who want to build a community to care for each other's health care expenses? You get which draws upon some of the concepts of crowd funding for one time health care expenses within its community. By taking people from all over the country and putting them into a community where there are expectations of caring for others, Crowd Health offers a solution to paying for health care expenses without breaking the bank. Is Crowd Health Insurance? If you've been paying attention to the US health care...
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Episode 152: The COVID Drawdown
The Paradocs Podcast with Eric Larson
Today we are going to discuss the COVID drawdown. Essentially, this is what must inevitably happen for us to return to lives of normalcy where we have typical interactions with others at family gatherings, sporting events, concerts, and business meetings. Unless we are prepared to radically change the way we live our lives and choose isolation (which probably has far greater physical and mental health detriments) then we have to consider how the drawdown occurs and what conditions ned to be present for it to happen. What HaS TO HAPPEN FOR THE DRAWDOWN TO OCCUR? We've talked to...
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Episode 151: Health Care for Those Who Don't Earn High Wages with Dr. David Berg
The Paradocs Podcast with Eric Larson
One of the scariest times for many workers is being presented with a bill for medical services. Even if they have insurance "coverage", the deductible or co-pay might be more than they can afford. For hourly workers in entry level jobs or low skilled positions, medical bankruptcy is a real fear. While barely making ends meet an additional bill for an ER visit or doctor's office stop can send you to collections and destroy your credit. Unfortunately, a lot of Americans are in this exact spot as they earn a living working these low paying jobs but have little medical security even if...
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Episode 150: Make Sure Your Health Insurance Broker is Working for You and not the Insurance Company with David Contorno.
The Paradocs Podcast with Eric Larson
When you run a business, one person you usually meet and hire is a health insurance broker. In theory, these brokers work with the employers to secure the best deals for health insurance to meet the company's health care objectives. However, in practice, the brokers serve as a sales force for the insurance companies who lavish them with bonuses, trips, and gifts. The seedy underbelly of the health insurance broker industry is that they are really not working to save money or get deals for their clients - the checks are written by the insurance carriers and that's who they answer to. Who do...
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Episode 149: Is Asymptomatic Spread of SARS-CoV-2 a Thing? with Daniel Halperin, PhD
The Paradocs Podcast with Eric Larson
Not only has the COVID pandemic politicized our country - it has led to a lot of misinformation and a shutdown of communication. For instance, is there really asymptomatic spread of COVID? Or just pre-symptomatic and symptomatic spread? That might seem like splitting hairs but it can have a profound effect on policy for quarantining and testing. We've talked about this before on the show as well as general discussions on COVID policy which can be found , , and . 12 Myths and 12 Facts About COVID-19 If there is one certainty during this confusing pandemic it is that there are plenty of...
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Episode 148: Urgent Care as Primary Care with Dr. Juliet Breeze of Next Level Medical
The Paradocs Podcast with Eric Larson
There are a lot of urgent care clinics all over the country. But few of them, to my knowledge, also operate as regular primary care clinics. But that is exactly what is happening today in the Houston, Texas area with the emergence of Next Level Medical. If you think about it, it makes perfect sense to leverage all the facilities needed for a primary care clinic - exam rooms, physicians, etc. and use it to deliver regular and sometimes non-urgent care. We've discussed before that lower the cost of care with transparency so this seems like the next logical step with urgent care. We...
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Episode 147: Has the Pandemic Led to Infants Losing IQ? - with Sean Deoni, PhD
The Paradocs Podcast with Eric Larson
The COVID pandemic has brought on all sorts of changes to the way we live our lives. From wearing masks, working from home, stay at home orders, and restrictions on social interactions, the virus has caused untold disruption to the way our society functions. Although the changes COVID has brought to our schools and the lives of our school age children, it is perhaps less appreciated what changes have occurred for our infants. It is a well known fact that our environment and meaningful stimulation is necessary for normal intelligence and brain development. Infants are completely...
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Episode 146: Explaining COVID in 11 Minutes with Dr. Eric Larson
The Paradocs Podcast with Eric Larson
Imagine yourself in California at a clearing in a large forest. And it’s on fire. There are three groups of people standing before you. A large group is screaming and running around pointing at the fire. They’re yelling that we need to do something, anything we can to stop the fire. Meanwhile, there is another group (not as large) with their backs to the fire. They are mocking and ridiculing the group running around panicking. They tell them to calm down and to stop ordering people around. They insist there isn’t anything wrong at all. Of course, the largest group of people are...
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Episode 145: Surgery without Insurance with Dr. Keith Smith
The Paradocs Podcast with Eric Larson
A lot has happened since we last met with Dr. Keith Smith from the back in 2018. . We also spoke about how the system was rigged to enrich the hospital systems, insurance carriers, and PBMs (what's new right?). So what's happened since then and how has the center done with the pandemic? Is the Surgery Center of Oklahoma Thriving or Just Surviving? Not surprisingly, Dr. Smith says that the center is doing just fine and has increased its market share from other states. Additionally, the international community from Canada is now being allowed to come back into the US for their...
info_outlineIf you want to get a doctor's blood pressure up or make her sweat, just tell her that you have a great electronic health record (EHR) to use. EHRs are the bane of a physician's life because they don't work well with your work flow, create extra work and inefficiencies, and cost a ton of money. That's why I spoke to Dr. Richard Sztramko of Hamilton, ON who is co-founder of Arya health technology company that has designed a new EHR.
To this American, I found it very surprising that an innovative EHR product would ever be developed in Canada with a nationalized health care system. The secret is that Canada's health care system isn't that different than ours in many ways. You can catch other episodes where we spoke about EHRs and why we hate the ones we use here, here, and here.
Canadian Docs Have Private Practices
Much like the United States, the Canadian health care system is made up of private practices for generalists and specialists. They bill in a manner very similar to US doctors except that their payors are just governmental. They still have to collect billing information, diagnostic coding, visit or procedure types, and time spent with the patient. It would be very similar to if every service in our country went through with Medicare and Medicaid.
Not all Canadian physicians are in private practice, many work in academic settings, like Dr. Sztramko, where they are employed and have the private non-profit hospitals employ them and provide the personnel to run their clinics and practices. This leaves the country with a non-uniform, disjointed medical system with software that doesn't communicate with each other and is often expensive to operate. The computer systems are the same as in the US in that it is becoming dominated by Cerner and Epic. Ultimately, our medical systems look very similar in their dysfunction for clinicians.
What Makes a Good EHR?
A good electronic health record is hard to find in the marketplace. But what constitutes qualities that make an EHR good?
- It maximizes your revenue capture. This is important that you get paid in a timely fashion by collecting all the coding information to get prompt payments and minimizing collection work.
- Improves daily workflow. A good EHR will make things more efficient from a scheduling standpoint and allow you to see more patients and get to the solution faster.
- Decrease time charting. The EHR should be quick and make charting even faster than it is on paper.
- Information should be easily accessible. Most EHRs make finding simple questions complicated. They aren't intuitive or they can only be found after multiple clicks
- Help your bottom line. The cost of the EHR should be easily outweighed by the increased efficiency and revenue that you bring into your practice.
Does Arya Pass the Test?
Not surprisingly, Dr. Sztramko feels that his new EHR product does what most do not. It is relatively inexpensive (only $300/user/month), intuitive, and actually decreases the time necessary to actually do your charting. One of the biggest benefits according to Sztramko is the fact that the program is so intuitive that training is very easy. He reported that in contrast to EPIC and Cerner training which takes days or even weeks to be a super user, Arya training is so easy that doctors usually only need an hour or just to watch the short introductory training video.
Dr. Richard Sztramko is internal medicine and geriatric medicine trained and is an associate professor at McMaster University. He is the co-founder of Arya Health tech company.
show notes
Episode 133: Today's show
Arya Health: Arya Health's website where you can learn more about their EHR product.
@RichSztramko: Dr. Sztramko's twitter handle.
Email for AryaHealth: [email protected]
IGericare is a website that helps caregivers of loved ones with dementia. Free and teeming with information.
Going from medical school to medical technology: Story in the Vancouver Tech Journal
Episode 067: Dr. Umbehr and his EHR for DPC docs.
Episode 028: Who doctors are and what they love and hate about medicine (guess what? it's electronic health records.)
Episode 023: HIPAA and electronic records.
Episode 015: Physician burnout due to things like EHRs.
MR Insurance: Today's sponsor for the show is Michael Relvas who helps physicians with their insurance needs.
Doctor Podcast Network: The home for the Paradocs and a number of other physician based podcasts.
Made Simply Web Site Creations: This is the great, affordable website service that built my wife's podcast site. I cannot recommend this company more to someone looking for creating a website.
Always Andy's Mom: Home of my wife, Marcy's, podcast for parents grieving or those looking to help them.
YouTube for Paradocs: Here you can watch the video of my late son singing his solo on the Paradocs YouTube page.
Patreon - Become a show supporter today and visit my Patreon page for extra bonus material. Every dollar raised goes towards the production and promotion of the show.
