Word: patients
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Medical records contain some of the most sensitive of personal information--including sexual orientation, past drug use and genetic predisposition to various diseases. As part of the Hippocratic oath, physicians promise to keep whatever they learn about a patient to themselves. But it's hard to keep a secret if more than a couple of people are in on it; in a typical five-day stay at a teaching hospital, as many as 150 people--from nursing staff to X-ray technicians to billing clerks--have legitimate access to a single patient's records...
...summaries; they want the whole record," says Dr. Nancy Dickey, chairman of the board of trustees of the American Medical Association. "So I think twice about what I include. Then I hope I can remember it all." She is worried that too much data sharing will jeopardize the doctor-patient relationship: "If my patients fear that what they tell me could come back to haunt them, they'll tend to be less forthright. I may come up with the wrong treatment because I was chasing the wrong clues...
...State Hospital, 1966, you peer into a charnel house of the soul, in which an emaciated and filthy body lies on the lower bunk of a two-tier unit while his doppelganger lies on the one above, encircled by a neon thought balloon. He is the real patient's dream; there is no escape from the confinement and lunacy; one fortifies the other...
...billion this year. "Something had to be changed," TIME's Bruce Crumley says. "The population is getting older so there are fewer people paying into the system. Between now and 2005 the system will break down unless there are significant changes." The new measures step up efforts to monitor patient's costs and call for punishments to doctors who surpass budgets for the care and prescriptions they provide. The government's goal is to keep medical bills from rising more than 2.1 percent this year, after an increase of nearly five percent last year. "The government is trying...
Steve Goodman, a cancer patient and avid Chicago cubs fan, once wrote a song called "A Dying Cub Fan's Last Request," in which he says that his ideal funeral would be in a ballpark...