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If we believe that time spent with patients is the most important piece of our patient care, we must have the conviction and courage to do what is right and say no when we need to say no, whether it is to payers who don’t value our time, or government data collection mandates that take time away from our patients. In return, I ask my patients to appreciate our efforts to dedicate our time for them.

Today’s physicians are busier than ever tackling high-volume schedules, chasing quality metrics and interpreting scads of data flowing into the electronic health record (EHR) 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Congress’s passage of the Medicare Access & CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) will have profound implications for the nation’s physicians, especially those practicing alone or in small groups.

With a major hack of an insurance company’s database having made front-page news not long ago, it’s natural that many physicians think first about electronic data when they think about protecting patients’ private health information (PHI).

Calling a Donald Trump presidency “a threat to the goals of medicine,” more than 600 physicians have signed a statement opposing him and urging others in the medical community to vote against the Republican presidential nominee.

The nearly 2,400-page final rule for the Medicare Access & CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) has been reviewed by healthcare experts, and the general consensus is that it’s an improvement compared to the proposed rule, but challenges for small practices remain.

Physicians have long expressed dissatisfaction with the amount of time and money it takes to deal with insurance companies, but the alternative, going insurance-free, may seem a risky, problematic model of operation that could send patients fleeing from their practice-something no physician wants to happen.