30
UPFRONT
Improving access
Lagging behind
T
A
he new Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will expand coverage and ensure that individuals and families are offered new and better services. It is hoped that it will improve patient waiting times that have been so common across the nation for so long.
Getting an appointment with a doctor the same or next day when sick, without going to the ER
Getting advice from your doctor by phone during regular office hours
30 41
Getting care on nights, weekends, or holidays without going to the ER
60 73
Any of the above
0
25
50
75
100
study of more than 10,000 primary care physicians in 11 countries has found that the US lags far behind in terms of access to care, the use of fi nancial incentives to improve the quality of care, and the use of health IT. In other countries, national policies have sped the adoption of such innovations. Key fi ndings include: • More than half (58 percent) of US physicians said their patients often have difficulty paying for medications and care. Half of US doctors spend substantial time dealing with the restrictions insurance companies place on patients’ care. • Only 29 percent of US physicians said their practice had arrangements for getting patients after-hours care. Nearly all Dutch, New Zealand and UK doctors said their practices had arrangements for after-hours care. • Only 46 percent of US doctors use electronic medical records, compared with over 90 percent of doctors in Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom. • Twenty-eight percent of US physicians reported their patients often face long waits to see a specialist, one of the lowest rates in the survey. Three-quarters of Canadian and Italian physicians reported long waits.
So to sleep…
K
now someone who is fresh and alert with as little as four hours’ sleep a night? The answer could be in their genes, according to new research from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia, which found that after several nights of restricted sleep, healthy adults who carried a particular gene variant called DQB1*0602 were sleepier and more fatigued during the day, and had more fragmented sleep than non-carriers. The variant is closely linked to narcolepsy, a sleep disorder that makes people feel sleepy during the day. Namni Goel, who led the study, said the variant could be “a biomarker for predicting how people will respond to sleep deprivation, which has significant health consequences and affects millions of people around the world”. If the fi ndings were confi rmed, it could justify recommending that carriers of DQB1*062 take naps or caffeine to help them cope during times of sleep restriction, added Goel.
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10/11/2010 16:36