Coding: Your Top Coding Concerns Solved
Tips from our biweekly e-mail newsletter. This issue: Help with observation codes.

Efficiency: Conquering Time
Do you feel overwhelmed every day? From the nation’s leading time-management experts, here’s the best advice on how to make the most of your day.

Healthonomics: How to Handle Health Savings Accounts
Our new occasional series on the nexus of healthcare and the changing economy begins with a look at health savings accounts. Increasingly popular with patients, HSAs promise owners the chance to have more control over how their healthcare dollars are spent. Yet they present unique challenges for your billing office.

Human Resources: Is Your Partner Impaired?
He’s been acting strangely of late: frequent tardiness, moody, a disheveled appearance. Your partner just doesn’t seem himself. Is it just stress? Or something more serious — and dangerous? Allowing denial to blind you to a partner’s substance abuse or other mental health problem could cost you, him, and his patients dearly.

IdeaLab: ‘Why I Blog’
Rob Lamberts, MD, explains why he keeps an online journal, or “blog,” and whether you should, too.

In Balance: A Family Affair
If you think it’s tough being a physician these days, try being a doctor’s spouse or kid. Your family is affected by your challenging, grueling (and, at times, disappointing) choice of career, too. You promised to stick by each other for better or worse. Here’s some help making it work.

In Practice: ‘I’ve Got Some Bad News’
Delivering unpleasant clinical news is one of the toughest jobs in medicine. Here’s how to handle it with clarity and sensitivity.

Physicians Practice Pearls: Creating an A+ Practice
Consistent staff performance is crucial. Here’s why.

Technology: Making EMRs Work in the Exam Room
You may be excited about your new EMR, but for some of your patients, a new gizmo in the exam room will take a little getting used to. Some people get nervous about new technology, so you’d better introduce it carefully.

The Administrator’s Desk: Finishing School for New Managers
When good employees are promoted to managerial roles, the transition can sometimes be rocky. Here’s how to help new supervisors make the leap successfully.

The Bigger Picture: Your Future Is in Your Hands
Aren’t you fed up with being fed up? Pamela Moore, PhD, wants to know: What are you gonna do about it?

The Editor’s Note: The Ratings Game
Ratings Web sites are intended to serve people looking for a physician, but they also function as a forum for nasty, often personal, attacks against physicians named publicly by anonymous accusers. Are they fair? Or credible? Hear what Physicians Practice’s executive editor has to say.

The Great Practice Makeover: Too Well-liked for His Own Good?
Solo endocrinologist Richard Plotzker isn’t worried about how to grow his business. He’s trying to figure out how to keep from drowning in his own popularity. Expert Laurie Hyland Robertson throws him a life preserver.

The Tech Doctor: The EMR — Savior or Poseur?
New research is raising uncomfortable questions about the connection between EMRs and improved patient outcomes. Can information technology really make you a better physician?