The PMD Critical List: Primary Care Pay Tops $250,000

Pay for primary care doctors is on the upswing as more physicians move to value-based models. That story tops this week’s PMD Critical List. Also making the list: Muhammad Ali’s longtime physician speaks, and the American Medical Association raises concerns about a plan to replace doctor visits with nurse visits for many military veterans.

• Primary Care Doctor Pay Tops $250,000 (Forbes)

Annual compensation of primary care physicians has eclipsed $250,000 as doctors are increasingly paid via value-based care models that emphasize quality, better outcomes, and keeping their patients healthy, according to a new Medical Group Management Association survey.

• Q&A Muhammad Ali's Longtime Doctor (USA Today)

Dr. Ferdie Pacheco served as the great boxing champ’s personal physician and corner man for more than 15 years. Known as “The Fight Doctor,” Dr. Pacheco offer ups his thoughts on the late prize fighter. “Ali’s life is a perfect novel.”

• Doctors Test Disease Prediction Tools (The Wall Street Journal)

“Using technology to help diagnose and treat patients can reduce the large number of unnecessary tests doctors order and antibiotics they prescribe by ruling out certain diseases. It also could expedite the appropriate care for patients by giving doctors grounds to treat them before lab tests can confirm a diagnosis.”

• Doctors Oppose VA Plan to Give Nurses More Authority (Stars and Stripes)

The Department of Veterans Affairs would dramatically expand the authority of nurses to treat patients without a doctor's supervision in a controversial proposal by the country's largest healthcare system “The nation's top healthcare systems rely on physician-led teams to achieve improved care and patient health, while reducing costs,” says the AMA president. “We expect the same for our country's veterans.”

• Why is Cancer Drug Spending Spiking (Fortune)

The worldwide oncology drug market ballooned to $107 billion last year, according to IMS Health, with spending on cancer treatments swelling 11.5%. Much of the growth stems from the explosion of new cancer treatments that have come to market in the past five years—namely Keytruda and Opdivo.

• Millennial Physicians Have New Expectations (PR Newswire)

A new survey, “Millennial Mindset: The Collaborative Clinician,” outlines how 26- to 36-year-old doctors “prefer a collaborative approach to nearly all aspects of their practice, from encouraging patients to do online research before their appointments to highly valuing two-way conversations with peers when it comes to learning about treatment options.”

• Doctors Fire Back at Bad Online Reviews (The Washington Post)

Burned by negative reviews on rating sites like Yelp, some healthcare providers are casting their patients’ privacy aside and sharing intimate details online as they try to rebut criticism. Most poor reviews “aren’t about the actual healthcare delivered but rather their office wait, the front office staff, billing procedures or bedside manner.”

• Doctors Put Overweight Patients on Path to Failure (Quartz)

“A new analysis in the International Journal of Obesity found that health risks for about 75 million Americans are misclassified by their weight category. Yet many doctors continue to prescribe weight loss to all their overweight patients. In doing so, they promote an intervention with a high rate of failure.”

• Bill Requiring Doctors on Probation to Let You Know Dies (KQED News)

The California State Senate has rejected legislation that would have required doctors and other medical professionals to notify their patients if they were on probation for serious infractions. The California Medical Association said the law “would undermine physicians’ rights to due process and amount to a de facto suspension by severely restricting their ability to practice.”

• Is Prince OD a Wake-Up Call for Doctors? (CNN)

A compelling essay from a family medicine physician and professor: “My intention here is not to place the blame of opioid overdoses solely on healthcare providers. Rather, it's a wake-up call for us to take a step back and re-evaluate our prescribing practices.”