Keeping the human connection in medicine

Last month, the New England Journal of Medicine published a thoughtful essay by David Rosenthal and Abraham Verghese on the many changes in how doctors are trained and how they practice medicine. Efforts to improve efficiency and accuracy — including the introduction of electronic medical records — offer benefits, and pose some complicated problems. Doctors need to learn and do more, more than ever The health care system strives to deliver better care while keeping costs down. Advances in medical science and technology mean there is ever more information for a doctor to know, and policies to curb waste have limited the amount of time we have to learn it all. Monique Tello wrote about this issue last month; it’s why your doctor is always at the computer. But more than that, these competing goals have had real consequences for how doctors work, how we think, how we relate to our patients and colleagues, and how we feel about our profession. An example: I’m a hospitalist. It’s a relatively new field in medicine, a product of exactly these forces. Two decades ago, when patients were hospitalized, their primary care doctors would see them in the hospital, in the morning, before returning to clinic for the day. Residents or nurses, often without immediate supervision, managed minute-to-minute affairs. But the culture and standards of practice have changed. We’ve decided that it’s better to have fully-trained doctors in the hospital all day. In an emergency, I can be a...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Health Health care Managing your health care Source Type: blogs