Mar 6, 2020
We live in an age where the process of communication always seems to have an intermediary involved. We text rather than call; we gossip on social media; we ask Amazon to send us things by talking to "Alexa"; we receive higher education in the form of online courses, we use AI to select potential romantic partners, and now we're eliminating another significant human contact point - the physician. We're moving into the era of telemedicine. While the training for physicians now includes becoming more people conscious and having as much EQ as IQ, we are telling them to be effective...
Read MoreFiled Under: changes in healthcare, coronavirus, corporate wellness, doctor shortages, healthcare quality, medical access, Mental Health, patient satisfaction, preventive healthcare
Feb 20, 2020
Healthcare delivery is traveling along the same road of interpersonal interactions as all other aspects of our lives. The examples are numerous. The younger generation receives most of its information through a mobile device and utilize text as the preferred medium of communication. When we shop at the grocery store, we used to have a pleasant conversation with a highly competent employee when we checked out. Today, we slide bar codes across a computerized scanning system that calculates the cost of our purchases as we self bag our items. When we seek information by utilizing our phone as an actual...
Read MoreFiled Under: healthcare quality, medical access, patient satisfaction, preventive healthcare
Jan 22, 2020
here have been numerous studies in the past few years focused on physician-patient interactions. Physicians continue to be under increasing pressure to move through their patient load as expeditiously as possible. This is true with our primary care doctor as well as with the specialists we frequently need to see. As a result of this time crunch, we often leave our physician appointments with the sense that many of our concerns were not addressed because the doctor did not have sufficient time for us. What can we do, as the patient, to facilitate a more effective interaction with our various physicians?The answer to this...
Read MoreFiled Under: concierge healthcare, family medical history, healthcare quality, patient satisfaction, preventive healthcare
Jan 8, 2020
Over recent decades, healthcare has been at the forefront of the political agenda in the United States. Each of the two major parties have suggested that they have the solution to bringing down costs and improving the quality of care. Yet, they only debate the cost of healthcare delivery and never address the issue of quality. This is because we can quantify the cost of care, but we have a hodgepodge of metrics to try and determine quality. The recipients of healthcare are the ones who are impacted daily by this quality confusion. As the debate continues about who should...
Read MoreFiled Under: concierge healthcare, Health Management, healthcare quality
Dec 3, 2019
In every major metropolitan area within the United States, you will find the names of leading medical malpractice attorneys, on TV and billboards, alerting you to their availability. I sometimes wonder if TV and radio stations would face imminent bankruptcy if the advertising revenue from plaintiffs' attorneys and politicians was restricted on the airwaves? As a licensed attorney for many decades, I can remember when these massive advertising campaigns by lawyers were considered illegal by the respective state bar associations. However, as time has moved forward, we have achieved this excessive commercialization of medical malpractice. In a recent Medscape Survey...
Read MoreFiled Under: changes in healthcare, doctor shortages, healthcare quality, Insider, patient satisfaction