Happy New Year, 2008!

Hey guys, I know its a few days late but Happy New Year everyone! My family and I went on quite a long road trip last week, visiting family and family friends along the way. New Year's eve was pretty tame, watched Ratatouille and Hot Rod.

Along the trip, we spent a night with a family friend who is an Internal Medicine/Hepatology Physician. We went on a tour of his new office, and let me tell you, the feeling I got when I walked in there made me want to reconsider a future in an office-based practice. He runs a totally paperless practice, using EMR software called eClinicalWorks. It was pretty awesome, letting him do basically everything he/the nurse/the receptionist needs to do, and its all amalgamated into one piece of software. I promise I'm not being paid to toot their horn, and all the info I've seen on it is based on the little 10-minute run through that he gave me, but it looks like my kind of office lol. Computers in each exam room (I would go with a single tablet PC, but whatever), a computer for the nurse, one for the receptionist, and involved faxing prescriptions, telephone records, everything.

SO, I was kind of excited for a little bit, and then all of a sudden, our family friend doc starts talking about how the work he puts in isn't really being reciprocated by reimbursements, etc. He was one of the few people to try and convince me to go into ER medicine. Anyway, that's definitely something to think of in the future...we'll see how it goes (gotta pass the Step 1 first!)

As my winter break comes to a close, I'm not looking forward to going back to St. Andrews for a week of revising and then 2 weeks of exams...but I definitely am looking forward to the 2 week break after that - one of the good parts of the St. Andrews calendar :-D

-AMiB