Nurses are an essential component of the American health care system and are continually in high demand nationwide. For years, nurses have elected to leave the field or have sought alternative professions instead of working in a traditional nursing role full-time. The pandemic brought into focus the need for work-life balance across professions. Whether strained from high-stress levels, financial upset, demanding hours or an overwhelming workload, nursing …
Medtech companies realize that it’s not a trivial task to get a surgeon to just start using a new device. Surgeons have a great deal of responsibility, and their job involves learning a lot of techniques. Therefore, when surgeons learn a technique and master it over the course of years and decades, it will take a lot of convincing to get them to switch to a new one.
But technological progress …
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light the vital roles effective communication and reliable technology play in the patient journey, starting from the moment a patient is on the way to the emergency department (ED) through to discharge. There are many moving parts during an ED visit, and the process of keeping the patient, their family, and other departments within the hospital or health system informed is no small feat …
Being an internist, the day is filled with problem-solving. The problems are often not straightforward and require thinking, rethinking, reevaluating, and reading up and researching before the problem can be solved. However, when a sixth sense, an intuition kicks in that warns us that something needs to be addressed urgently even when we cannot specify or articulate why.
Once I had a patient come in for shortness of breath that is …
If you’re not intricately involved daily with SEO, let me explain what happened in May 2020 and why it will be a huge boost for content created by physicians.
First, what is SEO? In short, it is the process of optimizing content found online in order to help it be seen by those searching for the information found in that content. It used to be that people would just stuff their …
I have written, or more accurately ranted, about electronic medical records (EMR) systems throughout this blog. While the systems have clearly improved since their mandatory introduction into the medical universe, they have still not delivered on many of their promises.
Of course, EMR has brought tremendous advantages to the medical profession, and we are all grateful for the technology. But this progress has exacted a cost. Many of them are clumsy …
An excerpt from Scope Forward: The Future of Gastroenterology Is Now in Your Hands.
Over a decade ago, many of us still used landline phones, watched cable TV, rented DVDs, called for taxis, took photos using cameras, and drove over to Borders to browse and buy books. …
When we think about holistic medicine, many assume that it requires human-to-human touch points and, therefore, doesn’t lend itself well to technology and innovations such as artificial intelligence. In fact, holistic medicine and whole-person care advocates often view technology as manufactured or impersonal and therefore dismiss its utility for health care. This is because there is a perception that health care tech values the human experience only for the purpose …
What if I told you just a few years ago that Amazon — a budding e-commerce startup — would come to disrupt the multi-billion dollar retail industry.
I seriously doubt that anyone could have given it a serious thought. At least not in the magnitude that will force a slew of big-box retailers to shut their doors for good.
I am sure the same response would have been elicited about Uber and …
I recently spoke with a colleague who transitioned out of the military in the last year. He was previously excited about his new job opportunity, but now a year later, he tells me, “I hate civilian medicine.”
I was surprised because he had been excited about the opportunity to teach in a residency program again. He said, “I love teaching, and I love the residents. …
During one long ago very hot Washington, DC summer, at the suggestion of my parents, I enrolled in a typing course that was given at our elementary school.
This was the summer between sixth and seventh grades, and there were lots of things I would’ve preferred to have been doing, but my dad, who started out in advertising, felt that touch-typing …
The storage capacity of the human mind is amazing. One estimate of the size of the brain’s “RAM” is as high as 2.5 petabytes (a million gigabytes). The number is based on the total number of neurons in the brain and the total number of possible connections per neuron. I suspect it is an overestimate, given the vagaries and innate inefficiency of biological systems. Nevertheless, the true figure …
Today was like no other day. It was our first day together.
Me and my “virtual” scribe — an actual person who seems to “virtually” to exist inside of a Jabra speaker on my desk and so subtlety that I forgot to mute a few times when not seeing patients. The “man” in the Jabra speaker now knows just how long of an appointment I need for my hair, and that …
Collaboration is the key.
When I think about how hard it is to take care of our patients, and how many different people are involved in their care, it’s a wonder that anything ever gets done.
We need to simplify systems, and harness the power of the information systems available to us, as well as the promise of the electronic medical record, …
More than 200 health organizations have now implemented OpenNotes. Many more are piloting, are soon to implement — or have implemented, and we don’t know it! For more than three years I’ve been fortunate to represent OpenNotes to potential implementers, and I’m confident I’ve heard almost every clinician concern or anxiety regarding what might happen when patients read their own notes.
Here are the five most common concerns I’ve heard — …
It’s 10 p.m.
Seven days before Christmas.
I’m sitting at work “finishing” up some charts.
I am suddenly overcome with anger.
What am I doing here right now at this minute? I am helping no one.
This work I’m typing away at — trying so hard not to scream — it’s hoops. Fucki*g hoops … for insurance companies. So I can beg them to pay me. Pay me pennies for the hard, good, compassionate, humanitarian …
It’s always kind of a surprise when you read a patient’s chart, and you see an examination of a body part they just don’t have.
Just the other day, I was reading a consult note on a patient of mine who had been seen by a subspecialist for evaluation of a serious issue, and I received back a long detailed office …
As Wei Wei Lee sat with her doctor to discuss starting a family, she felt a “distance” between them. The physician was busy on the computer and focused on the screen.
“It just didn’t feel very personal,” Lee said. “I didn’t feel heard.”
It seemed as though keeping a record of the conversation was more important to the doctor than making a connection with Lee.
It wasn’t the experience she wanted, but she …
Following on the heels of The Creative Destruction of Medicine and The Patient Will See You Now, Dr. Eric Topol has published his newest book, Deep Medicine, earlier this year. While the first two books highlight how technological disruption will first digitize and then democratize medicine, his newest is about deep learning, and how artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to ultimately deepen the patient-physician bond. It …
If you throw a pebble today, it’s likely to land on an article that talks about how artificial intelligence and its brother — machine learning — are changing health care.
Yes, I get it broadly. But I was curious to explore how exactly health care’s trends are shaping a single medical specialty. I chose gastroenterology (GI) because I’m most familiar with the space. And here’s what I found.
Trend #1: Manipulating bacteria …
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