Refugee Medicine – Difficult Life and Death Choices

  November, 1983: Each day a new truck would arrive at the Catholic Relief Service’s hospital camp in southeast Thailand; a flatbed pickup filled with sick and dying refugees from the forest floor near the Cambodian border. The patients were primarily young mothers and children struggling to survive...

Dr. Stearns Receives Faculty Student Teaching Award

Michael Stearns, MD was selected by the third year medical school class of the University of Maryland School of Medicine to receive the prestigious Faculty Student Teaching Award in 1989.  This award is granted to one faculty member each year by the student body of each class, making it one of the more...

Facial Recognition Technology and an Individual’s Right to Privacy

Imagine being able to merely glance in the direction of a stranger and then instantly access  everything about them that is available online including their address, age, date of birth, political affiliation, comments made about them on-line (truthful or not) criminal records, relationship status, and other...

Electronic Health Records and the Transition to ICD-10

The following article published by Neurology Times in June of 2014 describes the advantages of using a clinical terminology with EHRs and then mapping to claims-based classifications systems like ICD-10 for reporting. Electronic Health Records and the Transition to ICD-10. It was also published by...

The Worst Features About EHRs and How to Fix Them

The following is an except from an article Published in “Neurology Today.”  It includes an interview where Michael Stearns, MD provided feedback on challenges related to the use of electronic health records (EHRs). “THE NOTES READ LIKE JUNK” “EHRs differ so vastly in how they...