Physician and
healthcare worker burnout have been common topics in our class this semester.
However, the author of the linked article seems to think that things might be
slowly improving as far as physician workload and experienced burnout. One
thing that Mr. Heller mentions in his article is that most doctor’s spend a
large amount of their time doing documentation and ultimately, they would
rather be spending their time with patients.
In my
experience, documentation in healthcare is all that anyone seems to care about.
It is time consuming and tedious. I can only imagine how much more documentation
physicians must have to complete and maybe this focus on paperwork is what leads
some patients to feel their doctor doesn’t care of doesn’t spend enough time
with them. Maybe, we could find an efficient way to consolidate documentation so
that physicians can spend the time doing what they want to do, which is,
according to the article, spending more time with their patients. It reminds me
of academic testing… the higher-ups are so concerned with testing that often
times teachers lose the ability and freedom to be innovative in their
instruction, rather they must check off the boxes that the test makers dictate.
The same could be said with the concept of the IQ test as presented by Lilly in
her midterm report. We are so focused on the numbers, the testing or the
documentation that we are truly missing what is needed.
DQs:
1.
What
drives society to focus on test results, IQ scores and documentation?
2.
What
is being lost as a result of this focus?
3.
What
improvements can be made to save time and improve the experience of physicians?
4. What other issues do physician's face that may lead to patients feeling like they don't care?
https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/generalprofessionalissues/79257
If we can turn driving over to robots I wonder why we can't do the same with medical paperwork? Only partly kidding.
ReplyDeleteSee "Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again," By Eric Topol
DeleteWhat drives society to focus on test results, IQ scores and documentation?
ReplyDeleteI think that we are very test-driven simply because it's easiest; there's no subjectivity to it. There's no bias in the actual process of a blood test, unless a doctor decides to not disclose particular results. Regardless, the results are undisputable.
Like Kevin said, this type of data is subjective and often irrefutable, so its necessary in order to fully analyze an issue. However, it takes away from the importance of qualitative analysis. I want to bring up a congress hearing I listened to a snippet of, where a Kentucky representative, graduate of MIT with 2 degrees (I can't remember his name) implied that political science was "pseudo science". As a political science major myself I have often had comments directed towards me and my choice of major implying that its a useless one; one that isn't really helpful or career oriented. When we chose to only let "facts" determine the weight of any input, we ultimately suggest that the world is a black and white, right and wrong, that at the rudimentary basis humans and all their aspects are measurable. This is obviously not true. Nonetheless, I do see why subjective data is difficult to work with, but we be wary about how we present "facts".
ReplyDeleteI always think about this: We typically agree that stealing is wrong, that is a fact for many people. But when we introduce context to a situation of theft, many us of shift our position...ex: A starving child steals an apple.
This is what happened when Arthur Jensen came to the understanding that African Americans and other minorities were intellectually inferior to white people. He looked at the facts presented and overlooked the critical elements that are much more difficult to measure, such as environmental factors.
I know my comments are everywhere sometimes and unclear but I hope you guys at least got where I was trying to go with that.