KevinMD's Take, February 11. 2013

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How can doctors be better physicians?

By being patients.

Many doctors don't have the conditions their patients have, or take the same medications they do.  It's hard sometimes to be put in their patients' shoes.

Cardiologist Kevin Campbell articulates this thought in his guest post:
As physicians, we must remember that the people we care for are often lonely, frightened and may feel as if their world is spinning out of control. Becoming a patient can open our eyes to the challenges of the patient condition. We must strive to provide better, more compassionate care to our patients. By wearing a gown, providers may be able to better empathize with patients and ultimately ease the pain of living with disease.
That's one of the benefits that social media brings to health care.  On my own blog, for instance, I occasionally have posts from patients describing how difficult it is to navigate our health system.  Physicians sometimes cannot appreciate that.  But by reading these posts, they can gain insight from the patient's perspective.


One of the problems of electronic medical records (EMRs) is an overload of data.

EMRs don't have enough analytical tools to filter information in a form that could be appropriately processed by physicians.

And that can lead to malpractice risk, writes Wes Fisher in this guest post:
With all these people and devices ordering and sending, the limited number of doctors out there are being bombarded from multiple directions.   It is getting harder to keep up these days.  Orders and notices come to us on names we don’t recognize or have been long forgotten.  (Computers don’t forget that you saw the patient eight years ago).  And once an order is placed and acted upon without our knowledge these days, we click on the order to clear our notices and thereby assume all the legal risk for the care.

The legal buck still ultimately stops with us.
In the zeal to bring physicians into the digital age, details like this are overlooked.  Physicians need to speak up about EMRs' shortcomings, and put pressure on manufacturers to provide doctors with EMRs that better filter the vast amounts of data physicians confront.