HIV and ID Observations

December 26th, 2015

A Few Things We Were Talking About On Rounds …

Remember when people passed out papers of interesting clinical studies and relevant reviews? And how some doctors even had a special stamp they put in the upper right hand corner? OK, full confession — I did that. A lot. See evidence to the right. Haven’t used the thing in well over a decade, surprised I still […]

---

December 19th, 2015

Part 2, Now The Good News: Why ID Will Survive as a Specialty

Part 1 of this post, which highlighted the primary reason for declining applications to ID fellowship programs, could come across as something of a downer. “Moping about it won’t get us anywhere,” someone said to me, and it’s true nobody likes a whiner. But my point was to acknowledge the issue, and find a way forward. It […]

---

December 17th, 2015

A Certain Billionaire’s Arrest Prompts Universal Responses — and a Brilliantly Funny One, Too

Several words swiftly come to mind when hearing the news that Turing’s Martin Shkreli was arrested for security fraud. Karma. Just desserts. Kismet. Schadenfreude. Inevitable. But leave it to Andy Borowitz to get it just right: Ha, that’s perfect. Diana Olson from IDSA emailed me “Someone should make a movie …”, which is of course exactly right. […]

---

December 12th, 2015

The 2015 ID Fellowship Match “Historic Bad”: Part 1, Debating the Cause

This year’s ID fellowship match has just taken place, and the results were, ahem, not pretty. Part 1 will cover why we’re in this situation; in Part 2, I’ll offer some reasons for optimism, and even some solutions. According to data provided by NRMP, 117 of the 335 ID fellowship positions were unfilled. Dan Diekema from U of […]

---

December 6th, 2015

Do Electronic Health Records Make You a Better (or Worse) Clinician?

Earlier this week, JAMA Internal Medicine published a study entitled, “Level of Computer Use in Clinical Encounters Associated with Patient Satisfaction”. A more descriptive title would have been “More Computer Use in Clinical Encounters Associated with Reduced Patient Satisfaction”, as here’s the take home point: High computer use by clinicians in safety-net clinics was associated with lower […]

---