The Certificate of Waiver is one of the most common registrations for physicians wishing to operate an in-house laboratory in their private practices.

The physician’s name that appears on the Certificate of Waiver is more than a formality to allow testing to take place. It is a declaration that you are a true, hands-on laboratory director.

There are more than 350,000 laboratories listed with CLIA, the governing body for regulatory accreditation. More than 120,000 of these are in the “waived” category.  Labs that are classified as “waived” perform only simple test, are not routinely inspected, and have minimal regulatory requirements. The majority of these types of labs are laboratories.

Malpractice history and quality of health care are not synonymous.

In my most recent article I focused on physician profiling and described the emergence of how certain “expectations of efficiency” are being enforced.

In this article I describe the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) – why it was created and its intent, what it does, how the information may be construed and new information about the data bank.

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I had the pleasure this past week to sit on a Physician Careers panel. I'd like to say I doled out crucial career advice, but the truth is I kept my mouth mostly shut - the other panelists were too good to interrupt.

The panelists included a surgical department chair, a regent at a major public university, academic physicians, physicians in private practice, and a retired physician who has written extensively on money management for physicians.

The questions came mostly from first year medical students, but the topics and answers were relevant to physicians at almost any stage of their career. 

The advice was eye opening and refreshing - so here's a brief summary. (None of the comments were mine, but they are filtered through my messy memory, so all the errors are mine).

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A recent article in the journal Cancer observed that, in spite of declining colorectal cancer (CRC) death rates, this decline is not reflected in African-Americans.  African-Americans continue to have the highest rate of colon cancer mortality, including those African-Americans who have insurance.  This means that, for African-Americans, having health insurance doesn’t ensure receiving the same treatment and treatment recommendations as whites.

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