The hospital admission/re-admission policy (or lack thereof) is exactly the type of thinking that this article is addressing. ER/Urgent Care doctors have a list of criteria for hospital admissions that are not always present at the time but may comeback later. If they are use more caution then required a hundred dollar medical bill may turn into a several thousand dollar hospital stay over a minor issue. Doctors are dealing with imperfect information when making a diagnosis so to say that they need an "algorithm" is trivializing a complex problem. There is room for a lot of improvement in terms of helping medical staff make better decisions with more complete information. I am uneasy that some of the new regulations in this area will end up handcuffing doctors in ways that will not always be in the best interests of the patients
Note: not medical staff. Many years ago I processed claims for an insurance company and had some long and heated discussions about this topic with hospital staff. If some of these new regs are like what my oversized insurance company had, it will not end well.
