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  3. Have you ever felt slightly under the weather, called your doctor for advice

Have you ever felt slightly under the weather, called your doctor for advice

游客2023-08-29  34
问题     Have you ever felt slightly under the weather, called your doctor for advice and been asked to drag yourself to her office — only to be told to rest up and drink lots of fluids? Or, worse,’ have you ever spent a day playing phone tag so you could get the results of an important diagnostic test?

    Chances are these inconveniences could have been avoided if your doctor used a simple, ubiquitous(无所不在的)tool: e-mail. A study published in the July issue of Health Affairs indicates that patients who use e-mail to communicate with their doctors not only save time and money but also have healthier outcomes. The authors reviewed more man 500, 000 patient-doctor e-mails sent within the Kaiser Permanente network and found that people with hypertension(高血压)or diabetes(糖尿病)(or both)who e-mailed their doctors managed their blood pressure and blood sugar better than non-e-mailers.
    Given this news and given that millions of Americans have had e-mail accounts for more than a decade, why is it that only a small percentage of physicians report that they use the tool with patients? One reason is that primary-care providers, the doctors most likely to be able to coordinate care via e-mail, generally get paid $ 60 to $ 100 per office visit and $ 0 per e-mail. This kind of electronic communication is not recognized as a billable activity by Medicare, Medicaid or most private insurers.
    Kaiser is a special case in that the people it insures receive care at Kaiser-owned facilities where the doctors are essentially paid per patient, not per procedure. Its physicians "don’t get paid by generating more visits, so they find a more efficient way," says study co-author Terhilda Garrido. "It’s in their best interest to use e-mail. "
    The new Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act could help spread the use of e-mail, since the law is funding pilot projects similar to the Kaiser system. Dr. Fred Ralston, president of the American College of Physicians and an internist(内科医师)in private practice in Tennessee, is one of thousands of doctors across the country experimenting with such a model. The extra funding — which, in Ralston’s case, comes from BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee — could allow more primary-care doctors to fully embrace e-mail.
    "It’s a wonderful thing," he says. "You can spend probably 30 seconds and give patients commonsense advice. "
    Most doctors who e-mail don’t use Gmail or Outlook. To comply with federal privacy laws, they contract with software vendors(供应商)to set up secure independent websites. Some private insurers will reimburse for secure, third-party electronic communication but won’t do so for standard e-mail. Cigna, for instance, pays doctors about $25 for an "eVisit", in which patients, rather than writing free-form messages, fill out discrete Web-page fields.
    Dr. Richard Baron, a Philadelphia internist, takes a different approach. Patients can log on to his practice’s secure website and write as much as they like. "When people want to interact with their doctor, they want to do it in a conversational mode, " he says. [br] What kind of organization may Kaiser be?
选项 A、A large hospital.
B、An insurance company.
C、A health care organization.
D、A network company.
答案 C
解析 推理判断题。第四段开头说Kaiser公司是一个例外，因为买它保险的人都在Kaiser公司的内部医疗设施接受护理，那里的医生基本上按照病人数计费，不按照医疗程序收费。由此可知Kaiser公司不是单纯的保险公司或者医院，更不是一个网络公司，[A][B][D]三项均可排除。卫生保健机构可以为人们提供保险和医疗服务，符合原文内容，故[C]项正确。
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