Atul Gawande is the preeminent physician-writer of this generation. His new book, Being Mortal, is a runaway bestseller, as have been his three prior books, Complications, Better, and The Checklist Manifesto.
One of the joys of my recent sabbatical in Boston was the opportunity to spend some time with Atul, getting to see what an inspirational leader and superb mentor he is, along with being a warm and menschy human being. In my continued series of interviews I conducted for The Digital Doctor, my forthcoming book on health IT, here are excerpts from my conversation with Atul Gawande on July 28, 2014 in Boston.
I began by asking him about his innovation incubator, Ariadne Labs, and how he decides which issues to focus on.
Gawande: Yeah, I’m in the innovation space, but in a funny way. Our goal is to create the most basic systems required for people to get marked improvements in the results of care. We’re working in surgery, childbirth, and end-of-life care.
The very first place we’ve gone is to non-technology innovations. Such as, what are the 19 critical things that have to happen when the patient comes in an operating room and goes under anesthesia? When the incision is made? Before the incision is made? Before the patient leaves the room? It’s like that early phase of the aviation world, when it was just a basic set of checklists.
In all of the cases, the most fundamental, most valuable, most critical innovations have nothing to do with technology. They have to do with asking some very simple, very basic questions that we never ask. Asking people who are near the end of life what their goals are. Or making sure that clinicians wash their hands.
Once we’ve recognized the recipe for really great performance, the second thing we’ve discovered is that our most important resource for improving the ability of teams to follow through on those really critical things is data. Information is our most valuable resource, yet we treat it like a byproduct. The systems we have – Epic and our other systems – are not particularly useful right now in helping us execute on these objectives. We’re having to build systems around those systems.
The third insight is that, for the most part, the issues have less to do with systems than with governance. The people who are buying these systems, installing these systems, and determining how they’re to be used… What are they responsible for? What are their objectives? We’re having to figure out how to get quality and outcomes higher on the list of priorities of everybody running health systems.
Our dumb checklist, or our incredibly sophisticated predictive analytics algorithm, or that incredibly expensive EHR system… none of those change that fundamental failure – the failure of governance. And none of them can, no matter how you design them.
Gawande raised the example of hospitalists. He asked me about my group at UCSF, which has – by focusing on performance improvement as our core mission – become a key innovation engine at our institution.
AG: I think your hospitalist example is really important. Over and over again, it’s the pattern I see: a powerful idea creates a momentum of its own. When you’ve shown that there’s an obvious better way to take care of people. It’s controversial, and hospitalists can be used in ways that destroy the original intent. I’m sure you think about this all the time.
But when it works, it forces the leadership change. Leadership didn’t create hospitalists. Hospitalists created leadership. I think that’s the way it happens.
The same kind of thing happened with anesthesia. People didn’t say, “Oh, we have to find a better way to manage the pain of patients, because surgery is causing horrible suffering.” Somebody came up with an idea, and demonstrated that you could relieve this problem. But it required incredible system change. You had to double the number of people working in operating rooms at a time when the United States had a lower GDP than China does today. “We’ve got a better way of doing surgery. Oh, and it will involve doubling the number of physicians you have providing the care?” Is that a great model? It was dismissed as totally non-viable, can’t work. But it didn’t matter. It was too important, and it became the driver of leadership change, rather than the other way around.
A similar thing happened with Paul Farmer. There were debates for a decade about whether you could treat HIV in poor patients. Oh they don’t have watches, they can’t take the drugs, they can’t do this, they can’t do that. Farmer is like, “Fuck it!” I am going to Haiti, and I’m going to do it in a little old clinic in the middle of nowhere. And no, they didn’t change a whole country … but they changed a paradigm.
I think that’s the cool thing, that it’s not the technology. It was the values and the core idea that demonstrated you could accomplish this, that got you there.
I asked Gawande a question I asked most of my interviewees: Will computers replace physicians?
AG: The variousness of the healthcare world is pretty extreme. When we look at the way that disease presents itself, we’re moving increasingly away from science. When it turned out that lung cancer is not one disease, but rather that it’s four or five different histologic subtypes, that made it more complicated. Now we know there are 47 – and the number is growing – genes that, in different combinations, govern the behavior of those cancers. Forty-seven genes, and then you look at the multiples of different ways that people have these genes. Now we learn that the epigenetics and the expression of those genes are incredibly dependent on the environment. Did they smoke, how did that affect the genes? Did they have any kind of industrial exposure? How old are they at the time that the cancer appears?
Our cells on our little Excel spreadsheets are getting smaller and smaller and smaller. We’re getting back to the world of the 18th century “art of medicine,” where everything is becoming an “eyeball test.” The danger is that it becomes actually increasingly data-free – that every single person becomes a case of one. That becomes impossible to learn from. Period.
Where we’re moving, I think, is towards saying, “I have a class of people. I’m going to try Process A on this class of people who have some combination of these different genes,” and stuff like that. And then, does that process lead to better outcomes? The processes will be things like, “I’m going to watch them for three months. Then if X happens, I’m going to do an operation. If Y happens, I’m going to give them chemotherapy.” That increasingly becomes the way we learn.
RW: In your work as a physician, do you think care is getting better or getting worse?
AG: I think it’s massively better.
RW: Why?
AG: It’s fundamentally because of values, more than technology. I think we’ve changed our values over time. That patient suffering matters. I remember as a surgical trainee, I was expected to inflict levels of pain that today are just not acceptable. In my first month as a resident, I went into an operation to do a rib removal on a young girl. I’d never done one before; I had a month of operating experience. A fellow was standing at the door in his scrubs, saying, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, cut there.” The attending is in another room. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.
The culture was, even to suggest that was a problem, meant you were weak.
Gawande asked me how I perceived the training environment today – particularly the tension between the patient and the technology.
RW: The residents’ instinct about teamwork is much better than mine was. I mean, the idea of my caring about what the nurses thought just wasn’t on my radar screen. And the residents’ instinct to get back to the bedside – when they’re spending all their time on the computers, they feel this loss and I think they’re trying to reconnect with their patients. We’re trying to create structures to allow that to happen.
But it’s hard – the residents feel they’re caught up in this world where everything they need to know is on the computer screen. That’s creating angst in their day-to-day life. You go up to the floor of the medical service in my hospital, and there are no doctors there. They come, they see the patients, and then they escape to this tribal room where all 15 residents hang out together, each doing his or her computer work. That means that many of the informal interactions that used to occur between the docs and the nurses, or the docs and the patients and their families, have withered away.
AG: Everything that they’re measured on and that defines their success happens outside the patient’s room.
RW: Correct.
AG: There’s a difference in surgery training. Everything that you’re measured on and that matters happens in the operating room. Although the patient’s asleep, the residents are having to work on their people-to-people interactions. How do you handle yourself with the nurses? How do you handle yourself with the doctors? What are your skills? They’re trying to figure it out and navigate it. It’s often a complete mystery to the students, and for a long time to the residents, too.
But except in the most egregious cases where you really piss off a patient, their success – being labeled an A versus a B – relates to “how much do I really know this patient?” It’s not getting my to-do list done for the day. Yet getting through the to-do list is the dominant task.
And we’ve both contributed to discoveries that indicate that all these little steps on the to-do list matter. It’s become an endless list of details that really, really, really matter. Do you have the right combination of antibiotics? Is the head of the bed at 30 degrees? When I think about the to-do list that I had when I was an intern, and the to-do list that the residents have today – today’s is just massively longer.
I closed by asking Gawande about the concept of the Quantified Self – patients wearing sensors and accumulating all kinds of personal data. While he is generally supportive of the concept, he has a concern, one that echoes the central theme of Being Mortal.
AG: I worry that we could become tyrannized by a combination of experts and sensors that have no close relationship to our priorities. That’s why I just keep coming back to the values. We’re here to alleviate suffering. I think it’s about this deeper connection we all have to something important.
Robert M. Wachter, MD is Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where he directs the 60-physician Division of Hospital Medicine. Author of 250 articles and 6 books, he coined the term “hospitalist” in 1996 and is generally considered the “father” of the hospitalist field, the fastest growing specialty in the history of modern medicine. He is past president of the Society of Hospital Medicine (1999-2000) and past chair of the American Board of Internal Medicine (2012-13). In 2004, he received the John M. Eisenberg Award, the nation’s top honor in patient safety. For the past seven years, Modern Healthcare magazine has named him one of the 50 most influential physician-executives in the U.S., the only academic physician to receive this recognition. In 2014, the same publication also recognized him as one of the 100 most influential people in healthcare. His new book, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age, will be published in April, 2015.
He blogs regularly at Wachter’s World, where this post first appeared.
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@ Chris Kapsa
You have misspelled the co. name. For the record and your surfing convenience, it is really http://fresenius.com/
Todd, something tells me that cases like yours and Chris’ are more numerous than many want to believe. That link at Christine’s post referring to an explosion in the number of for-profit hospice enterprises is not the good indicator it should be. In my post-retirement job as care-giver I have seen several hospice situations, and not all are what I would call admirable. They range from not-for-profit residential settings at the luxury end to the most minimal collections of on-call nurses who mostly put in their time and move on to the next client.
I am at a loss to know the way out, but I do know that competition for that little $5000 hospice benefit offered by Medicare (or whatever it is) is driving the wrong kind of results. Just a couple weeks ago I heard a story form a friend that his father-in-law was in a residential hospice setting and they had the nerve to call and tell someone in the family that they were not prepared to keep anyone unless they had less than two weeks to live. That, of course, is not legal and the person was prepared to take legal action against the hospice company, but the man did, in fact, soon die.
All this is “anecdotal” as are your and Christine’s stories. But there is more here than meets the eye, and as you said, the profession needs to remember what it’s here to do.
I’m sorry to have to ask, but what was Gawande’s actual answer to the question, “Will computers replace physicians?”
Far, far too few people understand the implications of your insightful post. Too many ‘histories’ of how effective innovations get adopted are “just so” stories. That almost never is how it really happened. The “anthropology” of how new stuff becomes the stuff we do is really important, & seldom replicable from a formula; and that’s hard news for the algorithm-bedazzled.
Why did you repeat this stale cookie? I like Emma’s comment.
Great article. People are definitely looking to the internet to make their own diagnosis
“We’re having to build systems around those systems.” Check your irreverence at the door, Mike –and I will. Still, I can’t help it. Aside from the well-placed f-bomb, that’s my favorite line in this post. Assume that the “he wryly noted” was implicit.
I am a sucker for smart physicians writing passionately and well about their craft as both Drs. Gawande and Wachter do here. I also love the essentially optimistic outlook—Dr. Gawande observes that care is “massively better” these days. We all sincerely hope that’s the case. It’s of course hard to argue with advice that we should focus on our values and the basic simple steps—but first things first.
Like some readers though I do wonder if we’re as radically patient-centered here as we might hope. For instance, I thought the closing lines about QS telling. “We’re here to alleviate suffering.” And thank God you are. Nevertheless, the point about QS is less about “we’re here to help you” and more about data empowering the everyman and woman to help themselves.
Cheers for an awesome read
Indeed.
I’m sure there are compelling arguments for and against EHRs but your ad hominem attack on these two men is way out of line. That comment embarrasses me on your behalf. You have reading and homework to do.
Confirms that EHRs are dangerous impediments to the safe and efficient care of patients, as has been my experience. Wachter and Gawande have residents and scribes using these systems and could not enter admission orders if their lives depended on it.
Egosystem! I love it!
Healthcare is a people profession. As long as people are patients, it will always be about people. The checklist is to make sure that people did/do the right things, the ‘what matters to you’ is all about humanity. Simple stuff.
I completely agree that there is no accountability at the top (governance) regarding what happens at the bottom. The 30,000 feet people need to stop acting like they know what’s going on at the Ground Floor….and the need to listen to them. The problem here is that we have an egosystem, not an ecosystem.
Great post. Two of my favorite people, Drs. Wachter and Gawande. And I’m two days late finding this. (I need to check in more often, but those tedious spam alerts annoy me.)
Back to the future?
http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/33/5/770.abstract
http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/33/5/770.abstract/reply#healthaff_el_477209
http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20140512/NEWS/305129962
Thank you.
We talk about patient engagement with BP monitoring and Fitbits. What about patient engagement with how medicine is practiced? On them. And their families.
Paul Starr wrote his classic “Social Transformation etc.” a generation ago. Corporatized medicine didn’t happen quickly, it won’t be changed quickly. But it won’t change at all if we all throw up our hands and admit defeat.
Atul Gawande wrote a graceful book about a painful subject. It’s a huge bestseller with the general public. Perhaps, a writer of his stature could humanize the topic of medical practice for general readers. The majority of Americans don’t know what’s going on. They need to be told.
Physicians, and nurses, need to put themselves firmly on the side of patients. Now the lines are blurred and patients are confused. We are the ones who must draw the bright lines again.
We need to talk about everything in the context of patient well-being. EHRs, gadgets, ACOs, the whole damn shootin’ match. We have to stop the corporate speak. And sound like healers again.
An important interview. Thanks, Bob and Atul.
Particularly important is the emphasis on organizational elements and outcomes (e.g., Farmer’s accomplishments), with technology as the handmaiden.
It’s also important to understand, as I know you do, that digitization that allows access to information has important consequences, as well. Web access to infection rates at a particular hospital, for example, won’t “replace” doctors, but it does replace the professional monopoly on information with a model of information that’s very accessible to the lay public. (Whether that’s health plans, competitors and lawyers or patients using it isn’t really important.)
In this sense, the information age brings accountability and change on an individual doctor level and on a system level.
“Suppose one group of highly respected IMs said, “Dammit, we’re going to hospitalize our own patients”. Told hospital management to take it or leave it.”
Great.
And suppose a group of highly respected patients and employers went to their insurers and said “We want you to only contract with hospitals that allow private physicians to manage their patients, and that allow patients their free choice of consultants. And we want you to fairly pay physicians for their time, so they can talk to us and manage our care, both in and out of the hospital. Take it or leave it”
Patients and physicians HAVE to realize that they are on the same side in this fight.
Read your blog. So sad about your mother: that’s the world of corporatized medicine.
“They’ve become rent-a-docs.”
On that, or in opposition to eventuality, we agree.
Thank you, Charles.
Chris I appreciate your comments and I am sorry to hear that you recently lost your mother. Please take care.
Gawande’s book is marvelous. But it did strike me that he had no new answers. In a way, how could he? There aren’t any. Yes, knowing what one wants at the end of life, understanding your values and so forth are helpful. But those are not answers to the fundamental issues of how society manages to give this care. Gawande knows that.
I am not familiar with Wachter’s later work. The seminal Wachter/Goldman article gives short shrift to patient satisfaction. It may, in part, have set the tone. Then, this being the US system, anything that can be monetized, is.
In the interests of full disclosure, I read the Gawande book while my mother was dying. She died about a week after I finished it. It was not a “good death”. My brother and I have been told many times in the past month our experience was common. If you’re of the mind, I write about it on my blog:
https://kapsacare.com/not-ready-die-betrayed-hospice/
Until hospitalists, case managers and policy hounds understand what is really happening to patients and families in the community, the Gawande book will be a good start. But not an answer.
One is only trapped by choice. Unless all of us in this godawful system start saying, “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore”, it will only get worse. We’ve all become the means of production to some one else’s income.
Physicians have ceded control of medicine bit by bit. First it was for more money and a better “lifestyle”. But that was a bargain with the devil. Now only the most frenetic proceduralists make real bank and everyone’s lifestyle sucks. And patients suffer.
Don’t even get me started on what’s happened to nursing, my beloved profession for 45 years.
I’m not attacking, I’m saying things don’t need to be this way. Suppose one group of highly respected IMs said, “Dammit, we’re going to hospitalize our own patients”. Told hospital management to take it or leave it. And that word got out. Patients would flock to that practice. Especially we savvy baby boomers. The affiliated hospital may see an uptick in business.
Maybe it’s time for the mice to stop cringing in the cage, nervously grooming their whiskers. Maybe it’s time to say “This is REALLY broke and we aim to fix it!”
Is there something of an underlying theme in some posts that Gawande and Wachter aren’t quite as patient focused as they should be? Gawande’s books — Being Mortal in particular, are about as patient-focused as you can can get. The stories are one after the other, told with great care and empathy about particular patients. I also have to disagree with Chris K a bit suggesting that Gawande sees the probs but doesn’t have answers. The way Being Mortal struck me was that it led inexorably to the question — for each patient in a later or challenging stage of life — What matters to me? This is a question Maureen Bisognano has been talking about for some years and it comes through in an almost majestic fashion in Being Mortal. It is not THE answerr of course but it is part of it. As for whether Bob Wachter was thinking about patients as part of the equation in his approach to hospitalists — well, he can speak for himself but having some familiarity with his work it is clear to me that patients are uppermost in his mind.
“Hospitalized people (perhaps with exception of elective noncancer surgery) are in crisis. They need care from physicians who they trust and know. Hospitalists are strangers, by definition. No matter how compassionate, that’s a yawning chasm.”
Agree completely. I’m not a hospitalist, and I don’t like the hospitalist system. But it is here, the inevitable and completely predictable result of the corporate takeover of medicine that both patients and physicians have allowed.
If you don’t like it, go after the system and those who profit from it. Attacking those who, like you, are trapped in it is like caged mice devouring each other.
Not helpful.
Seems, Grandpappy, you doth protest a tad too much. Never said all, never said anti-physician. You’re trying to read more into my comments than is there. Have you read the Wachter/Goldman article? It’s instructive.
I’ve no doubt there are compassionate, skilled and overworked hospitalists. But it’s a system they’ve chosen. One that permits a certain type of medical practice without the messiness of forming long-term relationships with patients and families. Just as ER medicine, radiology or pathology. The key difference is patients don’t expect wholehearted physician engagement in those specialties.
Hospitalized people (perhaps with exception of elective noncancer surgery) are in crisis. They need care from physicians who they trust and know. Hospitalists are strangers, by definition. No matter how compassionate, that’s a yawning chasm. And, sorry to say, many are technically competent but brusque and, yes, indifferent. They meet the quality measures, get the job done and know they’re unlikely to see the patient again. The hospital is happy, CMS/insurer is happy, employer is happy, case management is happy. The patient? Meh…
I agree with about two-thirds of what you say, the two-thirds that also applies to out-patient docs who are employed by corporations.
All of it is the result of a broken system, one that victimizes both patients and physicians.
But you want to make it into a patient versus physician battle, which is just what Frenesius et al want: that keeps us out of their way as they roll on down to the bank.
I know too many smart, compassionate physicians working as hospitalists to accept your characterization of them as uniformly indifferent. They’re stressed out, over-worked, and trying to do the best they can in an anti-patient, anti-doctor system. I don’t see how spitting on them is going to solve any of our problems.
Perhaps you’re the exception that tests the rule…
Thousands of hospitalists work for hospitalist/intensivist management companies. They’ve become rent-a-docs. Two of these companies, Sound and Cogent, are controlled by Frenesius, a big German HC conglomerate. So the care of thousands of hospitalized American patients is being indirectly determined in German boardrooms. Gotta love globalization.
Hospitalists have to toe the hospital management line. Avoid admits, force fast discharges and take large case loads. Hospitals have to make those hospitalist contracts pay. Further, hospitalists are working with those dysfunctional EHRs, so it’s difficult to learn much in depth about patients in any case. Particularly when several hospitalists may rotate through one patient’s admit.
Bob Wachter and Lee Goldman never envisioned hospitalists would be about patients when they wrote their NEJM piece in ’96. It was about saving bucks, convenience and medical education. There was a throw-away line at the very end about patient satisfaction. Prophetic.
Richard Gunderman, one of your THCB colleagues, wrote an excellent post last year on the topic. He, too, seems a decent and humane man.
“I will be the species you consider the lowliest!”
Not fair! You always get to be the lowest.
I want to be the lowest.
Mommy, tell Saurabh to let me be the lowest.
“Or a hospitalist?”
I will be whatever you wish to template your prejudices.
I will be the species you consider the lowliest!
You’re welcome!
Are you a patient with a favorite hospitalist? A doc in private practice whose patients come back thrilled with the care they’ve received in the hospital?
Or a hospitalist?
Or none of the above, so haven’t dealt with the species yet?
“You could paint a barn in one swipe with a brush that broad.”
Lol!
We all have our favourite bug bears!
“out in the wild patients feel lost under the care of indifferent hospitalists”
You could paint a barn in one swipe with a brush that broad.
“The people who are buying these systems, installing these systems, and determining how they’re to be used… What are they responsible for? What are their objectives? We’re having to figure out how to get quality and outcomes higher on the list of priorities of everybody running health systems.”
That’s the crux of the issue confronting healthcare: patients aren’t even in the room, much less included in the process design, when system governance is under construction.
This is a terrific read, and I found myself wanting to high five my screen while doing so. Yet and however, I’d suggest that both Dr. Wachter and Dr. Gawande spend some time talking to – even working with – expert patients, those of us who’ve navigated the system with self-drawn maps inked in blood and tears. System re-design and re-invention can happen even faster if you let patients help.
Atul Gawande stands heads and shoulders above most others writing about health care. His fundamental decency and humanity shine, even in this swatch of interview.
I’ve been fascinated to read many posts here and the resulting comments that never mention patient welfare or illness or care that’s of value to the patient, not the payor. Care of value to the patient is only discussed in contexts of stopping it.
There seems to be a medical technocracy echo chamber. Gadgets, hospitalists, ACOs, EHRs, bundled payments, MD angst (nurses suffer angst, too, BTW), quantified selves, HIT, CIOs…the list goes on. While out in the wild patients feel lost under the care of indifferent hospitalists, families struggle to care for ill relatives at home, basic drugs are unaffordable. Do these things not matter? Are they beneath notice?
Dr. Gawande has a runaway best seller because the pain of these dilemmas matter to him. And he’s willing to show it. He doesn’t have answers, but he sees the problems.
You’re welcome.
Thanks. Of course. There’ll be others, including Chris Sinsky, who has done pioneering studies on the impact of IT on workflow and clinician satisfaction. Still looking through the group to determine the most interesting ones. But thanks for the heads up.
Perhaps a woman or two? Lots of us in health care, it turns out.
I agree that Being Mortal is a brave, powerful, and important book – probably Atul’s most important to date. I hope mine lives up to your kind prediction.
As a journalist, Charlie, you are comfortable with something I had to learn; namely, I’d spend an hour interviewing somebody absolutely fascinating and then be able to use a single quote in my book, if that. Sometimes, a successful interview was one in which my thinking changed a bit, or I was sent to follow up a new lead.
That’s why I’m posting some of these interviews — it just seemed a shame to leave so much great stuff on the cutting room floor. Coming soon: Andrew McAfee (coauthor of the 2nd Machine Age), David Blumenthal, Mark Smith, Sully Sullenberger, and perhaps a few more. I’m glad folks seem to like them.
— Bob
The EHR vendors do! And their largesse has convinced the Congress too!
Terrific stuff. Should be required reading for medical students and perhaps physicians as well. Recently read BEING MORTAL — incredibly powerful and important book. I suspect Bob Wachter’s upcoming book will be as well.
Yes Bobby, this (BS) seems to be a recurring theme in “Chloe’s” posts.
Maybe he/she has an axe out for nurses due to some very bad experience. I can tell you, with a wife who’s been a nurse for about 40 years and done a lot, including management, there’s not many real facts in Chloe’s abuse. My wife is the first to push for dismissal of nurses who “F” up, or who even have bad attitudes.
We must view health care using both micro and macro spectacles. We can’t talk about the nineteen things we need to do when a patient comes to surgery at the same time that Blue Shield says that 280,000 subscribers can not go to their former physicians or hospitals, or at a time when 7 million new insured can not afford astronomical deductibles and co-payments, or when 700,000 physicians are required to use a faulty tool to write down what they are doing.
Misplaced perspectives make us look trivial.
“Nurses are empowered to make complaints about the slightest cross eyed look they might get from a doc”
__
The pathetic spelling that peppers your comment aside, that is complete BS.
I posted this once before, but it seems a relevant question in this thread:
Almost no one believes that EHR’s have yielded a net positive benefit.
Most medical providers believe it has been a net negative.
Yet billions have been spent….and the spending goes on and on.
Why don’t we repeal any legislative mandates or HHS policy mandates and just stop? Let any private system that thinks they can make it work proceed, but stop the incentive payments and coercion…..the savings would be immediate and substantial.
What century are you living in? Doctors are completly beaten down by managment. Nurses are empowered to make complaints about the slightest cross eyed look they might get from a doc. When was the last time (or first time) you’ve heard about “disruptive nurses?” What about drug diverting nurses, or nurses with felony records? You’ll nevr know about these because they don’t have a “Preactitioners data base” that records any of this. Doctors have become thew whipping boys of hospitals, insurers, and yes — even nurses. You are woefully misinformed.
I think there is a big difference between building new and innovative stuff and trying to spread common sense patient safety ideas like OR checklists and consistent hand washing especially when some doctors don’t appreciate being questioned, contradicted or called out by nurses, techs or anyone else of lower rank and pay.
For hospital management, the idea of empowering staff to speak up if they see a doctor not doing something he should have or doing something he shouldn’t have is easier said than done especially if the doctors generate a lot of business for the hospital and if the hospital’s financial position is precarious.
If the CEO’s mandate from the board is to grow revenue, profit and market share, those objectives will be his primary focus and patient safety will take a back seat. As long as risk adjusted patient outcomes and hospital acquired infection rates aren’t clearly worse than regional competitors, management will back up the doctors if that’s what it takes to keep business coming in the door.
Wachtet said it: EHR facilitates communication failure.
Atul said it: Epic needs workarounds.
I would have liked to have learned more about Atul’s work with Ariadne labs. If you look at the kind of innovation that’s going on all around us here in San Francisco, this is a very different kind of innovation ..
So many people are building stuff that’s extremely cool and potentially does all of these amazing things, that it’s easy to forget that the simplest ideas can often be the most powerful.
I would have loved to have heard Atul’s advice to the people who are building stuff. Which of their own fundamental assumptions should they be examining? What’s his take on the current health IT boom?
I would love to hear his thinking on how he we can redesign the electronic medical record to make into what it could be. Would be fascinating to have him play around with an EMR and listen to him think out loud ..
It would be redundant to say Gawande gets it. But I fear that there is a risk of not getting what Gawande exactly gets.
That is when something is self-evidently good, such as anaesthesia, systems will change. They will have to change. This is a bottom-up phenomenon.
It works because the innovation has a chance to persuade, to fail and then to succeed.
This is in stark contrast to the situation presently when someone, suitably decorated with a 100 page CV, has a bright idea with all the bells and whistles of compassion and humanity (they are not difficult to achieve) the system is forcibly changed to accommodate the idea.
This is a top down method. It fails not just because of the method, but because the stakeholders feel they have not had the opportunity to be persuaded.
It never gets a chance to exert its self-evident credentials.