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On this blog we have thoroughly established the existence of communications breakdowns within and among care teams. We’ve also pointed out the cost of these deficits in terms of patient well-being, dollars, and legal activity. All of that begs the question of how these problems arise in the first place. Glad you asked.
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The medical community spends a lot of time discussing the need for interoperability. EHR systems have long been the target of complaints from professionals ranging from nursing staff to hospital administrators. Countless startup companies are building software to integrate various aspects of digital medical records. The idea is to streamline the collection and transmission of patient information so that accurate and actionable insights can be drawn.
Our industry has a long way to go, though. With EHRs, information is for the most part input manually. This increases the burden on medical practitioners from a paperwork standpoint and reduces the time they have available for patients. Valuable features of EHRs are therefore offset by the disruptions they cause. (For an excellent discussion of this debate, please check out this article from FierceHealthcare.) So, what can you do to help move healthcare in the right direction while pushing your practice towards greater integration of health IT tools?
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Medicine is stressful. Every aspect of interpersonal relationships, communications, business, finance, operations, and customer service that one would see in any other field are present in medicine. However, layered on top of all that is the simple fact that medicine’s product is healthy human life, and everything gets even more intense. Leaving med school to start a residency, and then finishing residency to take on an attending position, are stressful and intimidating transitions for any young MD. We can’t speak to the challenges of providing actual care, but we did want to give those new physicians reading here our thoughts on communication-related ways to smooth out the process.
Think we missed something? Let us know in the comments.
Change is coming to Washington, D.C. We don’t pretend to know what that change will look like, and we aren’t going to discuss the politics of everything happening these days. However we, like all of our colleagues in the healthcare space, are watching closely to see how the transition and incoming administration affects healthcare policy. With so much attention directed towards the Affordable Care Act and where it’s headed, we thought this would be a good opportunity to review the evergreen issue of healthcare communications in the context of medical malpractice. As always, this is a brief and casual discussion, nothing in this post constitutes legal/regulatory advice.
We take for granted the volume of data collected and stored during routine exams and medical procedures. What is equally remarkable is this data is collected by means ranging from physical palpation by a provider, to highly calibrated machines and software. Technology to disseminate health data has developed alongside the tools to acquire it, although perhaps not at the same rapid clip.