Your relationship with social media

Scott DeWar · Jun 6, 2015

Umbran said:
Veterinary clinics don't generally their own e-mail servers. They are almost always using some third party, hosted offsite. I've known a couple large and savvy enough to have some machine always on to receive files on premises, but many aren't. Doctors for humans have larger budgets, typically, and are more likely to be able to manage such.

And having a HIPPA compliant 3rd party server is very expensive as the security, constant vigilance and complacency audits are highly expensive.

My brother is part of a business that takes HIPPA protected information and direct print to postal processes that information. He and I have discussed his headaches on this matter. His company is required audits every 90 days, I think, and they, his company, gets audited in a shorter interval then that, just to make sure they are compliant - purely for the sake of their clients and by extension, their clients.

sabrinathecat · Jun 7, 2015

I consider what has been dubbed as "social media" as utterly irrelevant and pointless. I've asked others for explanations, and no one has given me one that leads me to consider them worth my time or effort.

Umbran · Jun 7, 2015

Scott DeWar said:
My brother is part of a business that takes HIPPA protected information and direct print to postal processes that information. He and I have discussed his headaches on this matter.

Someone I know was in a car accident that led to medical complications. There was a call to get medical records sent from a hospital to an insurance company.

The process took *a month*. An entire month to process a patient's request to have records sent from Point A in Massachusetts to Point B in Massachusetts. I think the records had to be printed... in Georgia or North Carolina. It was absurd.

Scott DeWar · Jun 7, 2015

At the VA I spent the 6 week Induced coma I was able to have the records printed right there at that VA. Any hospital system should be able and needs to do this kind of quick efficiency. I only needed mine to file for disability.

Edit: As a side note, I hand carried the 1000 + pages of data. That was quite a feat in my greatly weakened state. I was so afraid I would injure my intestines or leak out of my colostomy bag or some other form of scary injury/occurrence.

Dannyalcatraz · Jun 7, 2015

Umbran said:
The process took *a month*. An entire month to process a patient's request to have records sent from Point A in Massachusetts to Point B in Massachusetts. I think the records had to be printed... in Georgia or North Carolina. It was absurd.

There are a lot of absurd inefficiencies in the American medical system, from a lot of different causes:

1) InsCo procedures that cause them to question payment for established routine treatments they had previously approved...usually a cyclical behavior
2) InsCo procedures that cause them to send out physical checks for amounts so small- as little as $0.01- it costs the InsCo, bank, postal service, and doctor EACH more to process than the check is worth.
3) InsCo procedures that cause them to pay out frivolous malpractice claims and cap coverage for defending against legitimate claims
4) Lawyers who have mastered the art of the frivolous claim
5) Health care providers' overcompetition for patients leading to overinvestment in equipment or physical plant, as well as improper billing practices
6) State-level as opposed to national regulation & licensing of health care professionals and InsCos.

All of these- and more- lead to very real economic costs measurable in dollars spent, man-hours lost, and even more serious negative patient outcomes.

gamerprinter · Jun 7, 2015

Just joining the thread for the first time... I use both FB and G+, but I use them professionally. My FB account does have some Kickstarter backers as friends , but the majority of friends are only RPG publishers, freelance authors, artists, and cartographers (about 350). Though I've been using FB longer than G+, I get a lot more traffic, have a lot more "friends" on my G+ account. I've joined every RPG cartographer community on G+ and religiously post maps, like I do here, and any person that +'d a map of mine, I invited as a friend. Though I have a little over 3000 friends on G+ account, my profile page (only 2 years old) has almost 5 million views. And lots of publishers needing map commissions have found me via FB or G+ (more luck on G+ though). I don't twitter or any other social media nonsense.

I check both my FB and G+ pages several times a day, and answer any questions queried of me, but its hardly different than checking one's email. I don't spend too much time with my social media, aside from posting product links or map samples. Again, I'm not a social media junkie though. I find it useful for my promotional needs, better than a lot of my other online participation.

And to the second part of the OP, I use my real name for both accounts, of passwords, I don't discuss that with anyone.

Umbran · Jun 7, 2015

Scott DeWar said:
At the VA I spent the 6 week Induced coma I was able to have the records printed right there at that VA.

As an anti-fraud measure, in the case of a car accident, the victim cannot deliver their own records to the insurance company. The victim's hands can't touch the records, lest they be tampered with to make the accident injuries look worse than they actually were.

Janx · Jun 7, 2015

Umbran said:
Veterinary clinics don't generally their own e-mail servers. They are almost always using some third party, hosted offsite. I've known a couple large and savvy enough to have some machine always on to receive files on premises, but many aren't. Doctors for humans have larger budgets, typically, and are more likely to be able to manage such.

That would be the scenario of small practices I was talking about earlier. Similar industry problem. Even doctor offices and such suffer from it. Only the bigger shops can really afford a decent IT budget to set that up.

Umbran · Jun 7, 2015

Dannyalcatraz said:
6) State-level as opposed to national regulation & licensing of health care professionals and InsCos.

Yah, try this one. Some clinics my wife works with are near the MA/NH border. Every once in a while, they would like to do house calls.

Now, you might expect, a doctor needs to have a licence to practice medicine in both states. That's fine, as those licenses also cover whether the doctor has knowledge of various State laws. And, you might expect that they need a Federal license to dispense controlled substances. Also fine.

But, they need a Federal License to dispense controlled substances *for each state, separately*. So, a Federal license for MA, and another Federal license for HN. Which makes no sense, as it is a *Federal* license. And these licenses are not cheap, so that if you don't do enough work in a state, it stops being worth keeping up the license.

Oh, and the facility must keep separate inventories of controlled substances for each state they serve, and do accounting for them separately. So, separate locked safes, with separate keys, separate inventory logs, separate bookkeeping and auditing. Heaven forbid that a Schnauzer in Manchester, NH gets needed pain meds that were bought for patients in MA!

Dannyalcatraz · Jun 7, 2015

Yep.

My dad was- for several decades- licensed in Louisiana. As an Army physician, he was allowed to practice anywhere coved by USA law. When he retired from the military to launch a private practice in Texas, he had to get a Texas license, and he didn't let his LA license lapse. So for many years, he went through some of what you describe. Eventually, he let his LA license lapse, though. He mainly had it for the convenience of being able to help family & friends in that state, and post-Katrina, most had moved away from there.