[Loughla]

The nurses at our local rural hospital are tagged and tracked wherever they go on the hospital campus. Time spent in one spot is part of their review.

I wondered why they zip in and out of the rooms, when just a few years ago they would spend fifteen to twenty minutes in each room. The patient load hadn't grown. The number of nurses has gone up, not down.

So I'm blaming the stupid metric on their evaluations for a worse standard of care.

[whimsicalism]

> The patient load hadn't grown. The number of nurses has gone up, not down.

Healthcare utilization, number of unique patients, amount of care per patient has all gone up.

American has a massive overutilization problem driving cost but is unwilling to be honest with itself about it.

[BeetleB]

AKA the "Be your own advocate and demand more testing!" crowd.

Although Kaiser tends to repel such patients (they'll happy say "No" and tell you to find some other provider). The bulk of complaints I've heard about KP in California boil down to "They wouldn't give me a referral to a specialist".

[whimsicalism]

Yes, Kaiser is a great model. We need to figure out a way to balance cost sharing with preventing over utilization, both on the supply side and managing demand and restricting interventions to those that are measurably changing outcomes (generally drugs, less so human-capital intensive care).

[Tomis02]

That's horrible.