It was 5:30 a.m., and I was startled to feel the nudge of my husband’s hand on my arm while vaguely hearing the sound of my alarm going off in the background. Although I was not prepared mentally to get up for another day, I quickly jumped out of bed so as not to allow the sound to wake my sleeping daughter in the next room. I cherished no actually, …
Residency and family: How this resident finds balance
The age-old saying is that knowledge is power. But what happens when you are overwhelmed with the information you need to make a decision without the understanding of how that information fits together to answer your question? It’s like trying to put together a large, complex puzzle without a finished picture for comparison. Oh, and by the way, you also aren’t sure you have all the pieces. This situation can …
We are clinicians in the era of information overload
One hot topic that has recently gained a relatively large amount of attention over almost all areas of medicine is quality improvement. Hospitals have created dedicated senior-level positions to oversee it, interdisciplinary councils have been formed to research and address it, and employees are reminded daily, if not more often, of their role in implementing it in the form of various quality benchmarks they are held accountable for (such as …
What does quality mean in the eyes of a patient?
Among the plethora of emails that I receive on a daily basis, there seems to always be at least one sent from my hospital’s information services department. Usually, I receive alerts about system downtime or notifications about resolved tickets. They all have the same general look and feel, and so I hardly ever question that they are official. And then I come across a communication with the message similar to …
Health IT: The weakest links in a system are actually the people who use it
When I was an intern in medicine, I couldn’t wait to start my role as a radiology resident. Even though I cared for my patients to the best of my ability and studied their diseases, I knew that my time in the department was limited. I wish I could say that I put my whole heart into my work, but with all of the extraneous demands of intern year — …
From medicine intern to radiology resident: Is the grass greener?
In a recent article posted in JAMA, authors presented a viewpoint about the phenomenon of the flipped patient when describing the increasing reliance that millennial trainees place on getting to know the electronic health record (EHR) of patients rather than the patients themselves. As I read through the text, I found myself agreeing with the points made by the contributing writers that EHRs are increasingly used as the first line of …
The phenomenon of the flipped patient
I recently began a rotation at the hospital as one of the night float interns. As part of this responsibility, I manage the care for approximately fifty patients each night. Day after day, I perform the same routine in preparation for the night ahead: Grab my stethoscope and pager, claim one of the code pagers, pick up a time sheet to fill in the nightly team to-do’s and mentally prepare …
How to survive a night float rotation
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