Empathy cannot be simply turned on and off

Medical Education
October 31, 2010

In our clinical years, our medical school has instituted a program in which we do learning modules along with our in hospital experience and didactics.

I was happy to see a module on empathy for my second month of surgery. The last question to be answered in this module was: “Although the studies on empathy are very consistent other authors have indicated that medical students are really not losing cognitive empathy, …

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Empathy cannot be simply turned on and off

Doctors should embrace feedback and learn from it

Physician
October 31, 2010

In Quality Measures and the Individual Physician, Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD questions the usefulness of feedback report cards for individual providers. She states, “Only 33% of my patients with diabetes have glycated hemoglobin levels that are at goal. Only 44% have cholesterol levels at goal. A measly 26% have blood pressure at goal. All my grades are well below my institution’s targets.”

It would be better for Dr. Ofri’s patients if …

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Doctors should embrace feedback and learn from it

Providing Medicare to everybody increases continuity of coverage

Health Policy
October 31, 2010

At a recent staff meeting, a colleague mentioned her client was at an “awkward age”.

I thought she was referring to a teenager, but she quickly clarified herself. She was referring to the age before someone is old enough for Medicare at sixty five, an awkward time indeed.  Many people between the ages of fifty to sixty four find that relatively minor health problems make health insurance unaffordable. For those with …

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Providing Medicare to everybody increases continuity of coverage

Social media is as important as the web itself

Social Media in Medicine
October 30, 2010

February 2010 was a fortuitous month for me. My website went live, and I met Ed Bennett.

Ed is director of web strategy at the University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS). Lucky for UMMS.  In his more than 15 years working on the internet, Ed’s been programmer, designer, consultant, information architect, start-up participant. Since 1999, Ed has led the UMMS web strategy building out large (50,000 page) content-rich …

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Social media is as important as the web itself

Blockbuster drugs are an addiction for Big Pharma

Medications
October 30, 2010

Blockbuster drugs.  They are, to this day, an addiction for big pharma.  A blockbuster can produce a huge ROI and fund the development of new drugs and new marketing programs but today the deck is stacked against blockbuster drugs.

The healthcare environment today is one in which cost containment is a key element.  In the next few years a lot of blockbuster drugs are going to come off patent including Lipitor, …

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Blockbuster drugs are an addiction for Big Pharma

How health care could benefit if a company followed Apple

Health Technology
October 30, 2010

Health care workers throughout the country daily face the growing pains of the transition from paper charts to electronic medical systems. Not only are there frustrations within each system, every hospital seems to have selected a different EMR.  When I was a medical student at UCSD, I was exposed to 4 separate EMR’s (Epic, PCIS, CPRS, Centricity, etc) during my rotations at various San Diego hospitals.

In this Wild West era …

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How health care could benefit if a company followed Apple

If there’s a doctor on board, please ring your call button!

Patient
October 29, 2010

Well, it happened again. Recently, I was somewhere over Saskatchewan, returning from a lovely Mediterranean cruise, in that uncomfortable semi-conscious state that passes for sleep when you’re flying coach, when the airplane’s PA system rang out:

“If there’s a doctor on board, please ring your call button!”

If you’re old enough to remember the show “To Tell the Truth,” you know what happened next. In the show, four B-list celebrity …

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If there’s a doctor on board, please ring your call button!

10 things you need to know before surgery and during the hospital stay

Physician
October 29, 2010

by Winston F. Mitchell

I’m a 53 year-old male with no history of hypertension, no cholesterol problems and glucose count normal.

I was overweight but still in great physical shape. But over a period of weeks, walking to work, I started experiencing a shortness of breath.  Finally I went to my doctor, he informed me he was going to admit me to the hospital immediately because a …

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10 things you need to know before surgery and during the hospital stay

Deceptive marketing is widespread in health care

Health Policy
October 29, 2010

Recently, reports about deceptive marketing and other questionable practices used by the growing for-profit higher education industry in the US appeared in the news.  For example, per Bloomberg:

Recruiters at U.S. for-profit colleges lied to entice students and encouraged them to commit fraud to qualify for aid, a report by the Government Accountability Office found.

Recruiters at all 15 colleges studied by the GAO, Congress’s investigational arm, misled potential students about the …

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Deceptive marketing is widespread in health care

Physician email implementation inertia

Physician
October 29, 2010

by Jon Meyer

Looking at the industry response to the recent study released by the Center for Studying Health System Change, Physicians Slow to E-mail Routinely with Patients – Issue Brief No. 134, it appears that a piece of the puzzle is missing. Both the study, and the analysis, put the physician at the center of the email debate. In reality, about 30% of a medical practice’s communication is from the …

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Physician email implementation inertia

Why physicians should care about online reputation management

Social Media in Medicine
October 29, 2010

I am going to explain a bit about why physicians should care about online reputation management (ORM).

As the online world becomes more pervasive, reputations are increasingly built and managed on the Internet. Online Reputation Management is the process of monitoring, addressing or mitigating SERPs (search engine result pages) or mentions in online and …

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Why physicians should care about online reputation management

US News hospital rankings too subjective and encourage self-promotion

Physician
October 28, 2010

Every year US News & World Report publishes its rankings of the nation’s top 50 hospitals. Hospital administrators await this top 50 report with a tension and fervor that rivals the NFL first-draft pick.

As soon as the report is released, snippets rocket their way into donor appeals, local hospital signage, and highway billboards. “Ranked X by US News & World Report” becomes a descriptor that is supposed to …

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US News hospital rankings too subjective and encourage self-promotion

Comparative effectiveness research needs to be taught to doctors and patients

Physician
October 28, 2010

Oncology is the area where the health care cost conundrum is coming into sharpest focus. Theoretically, who wouldn’t spend whatever it takes to cure a life-threatening disease? And yet practically the costs of new treatments are so high, and the improvements usually modest enough, that when it comes right down to it costs are becoming a real issue for patients and doctors.

An interesting article in the Journal of Clinical Oncology …

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Comparative effectiveness research needs to be taught to doctors and patients

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Sick doctors who work are doing more harm to their patients than good

KevinMD
October 28, 2010

Doctors: if you’re sick, don’t go to work.

The stereotype of doctors is that they go to work, despite whatever symptoms ail them. Calling in sick places strain on colleagues. Especially in residency, where team members are expected to pick up the slack.

In a recent column, the New York Times’ Pauline Chen discusses the image of self-sacrifice that a sick doctor going to work portrays:

Hacking, febrile or racked with the …

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Sick doctors who work are doing more harm to their patients than good

How healthcare marketers can connect with patients

Patient
October 28, 2010

by Daphne Swancutt

Call it a silly, useless curse. I get sucked in to trying to find patterns and connections anywhere I can. Most of them are silly and useless. Occasionally I find ones that actually make some sense, if only to me.

As a healthcare marketer who also geeks out on reform, genetics and the e-patient movement, I can’t help but try to wrap healthcare up into …

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How healthcare marketers can connect with patients

Social medicine and global health should be pre-med requirement

Medical Education
October 28, 2010

We’ve started taking a course called the “Introduction to Social Medicine and Global Health” headed up by Paul Farmer and David Jones. This is a course that exposes us to a variety of issues related to the social determinants of illness and health with a different lecturer each week. Recently, we had Nicholas Christakis, this week we have Allan Brandt, and for the next few weeks we’ll have Michael Porter, …

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Social medicine and global health should be pre-med requirement

How an antidepressant can hurt your patient

Medications
October 27, 2010

Patients want a quick fix. Society wants patients to have a quick fix, so that they can quickly return to their usual performance at work and home.

Patients still have shame about seeking help from a psychiatrist or other mental health professional. So they ask help for their depression from their primary care physician. The PCP feels an emotional pressure to provide the quick fix in that 15-minute appointment – the …

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How an antidepressant can hurt your patient

Bathroom, lighting and flooring modifications that can save your life

Patient
October 27, 2010

An excerpt from Treat Me, Not My Age: A Doctor’s Guide to Getting the Best Care as You or a Loved One Gets Older.

The bathroom: This is the most dangerous place in the home, what with hard surfaces, water that makes floors slippery, nothing but your birthday suit between you and the tile and tub, and, to top it all off, poor access to a telephone should …

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Bathroom, lighting and flooring modifications that can save your life

A physician seeing the husband and wife together

Physician
October 27, 2010

As a medical provider, while seeing a husband and wife, or a couple, regardless of gender, one comes across several situations that  may be considered difficult to handle and that require a good deal of tact and confidentiality.

This is the case with seeing a husband and wife or (couple), together, for an examination. Ultimately, it depends on the rapport that the couple shares. If they …

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A physician seeing the husband and wife together

Unintended consequences from healthcare reform

Health Policy
October 27, 2010

In early October, the New York Times published two articles that addressed a pervasive problem from slightly different perspectives. Boiled down to its essence, the problem is the unintended consequences of some provisions of the new healthcare reform legislation.

In his well crafted article, entitled “Health Care’s Uneven Road to a New Era,” David Leonhardt explored the impact caused by the introduction of new regulations into a “status quo” system.

So-called “mini-med” …

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Unintended consequences from healthcare reform

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