Robert Wachter – The Health Care Blog

Bob Wachter’s 2017 Penn Med Commencement Address “Go to Radiology”

May 17, 2017• 4

By BOB WACHTER, MD

Dean Jameson, Trustees, Faculty, Family and Friends, and most of all, Graduates of the Class of 2017:

Standing before you on this wonderful day, seeing all the proud parents and significant others, I can’t help but think about my father. My dad didn’t go to college; he joined the Air Force right after high school, then entered the family business, which manufactured women’s clothing. He did reasonably well, and my folks ended up moving to a New York City suburb, where I grew up.

There were a lot of professionals in the neighborhood, but my dad admired the doctors the most. He was even a little envious of them. This became obvious on weekend evenings when he’d get dressed to go out to a neighborhood party. He’d look perfectly fine – slacks, collared shirt, maybe a sweater. But there was one thing out of place: he’d be wearing our garage door opener on his belt. “Dad, what exactly are you doing?” I would ask, somewhat mortified.

“There’ll be lots of doctors at the party tonight,” he’d reply. “They all have beepers, I have nothing.” The strangest part was when the party was next door, the garage door would sometimes go up and down, as dad showed off his “beeper.”

Computers Replacing Doctors, Innovation and the Quantified Self: An Interview with Atul Gawande

Feb 5, 2015• 49

By ROBERT WACHTER, MD

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.Continue reading…

Disrupted: How Computerization Is Changing the Practice of Medicine In Surprising Ways

Jun 28, 2014• 39

By BOB WACHTER, MD

Bob Wachter

The following is an excerpt from the preface of my new book, which is tentatively titled: “Disrupted: Hope, Hype and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s New Age.” Author’s note and request to THCB readers.

If you’re a 24-year-old who does not plan on getting sick for the next couple of decades, this is probably not the ~~book~~ blog post for you.

By the time you need our healthcare system, it will be wired in ways we can’t imagine today. By then, computers will have transformed healthcare – as they already have retail, publishing, photography, and travel – leaving it better, safer, and maybe even cheaper. Most of the kinks, perhaps other than what our society will do with boatloads of unemployed dermatologists, radiologists, and hospital administrators, will have been ironed out. I hope to live to see this day myself. It’ll be, as my kids say, hecka cool.

But for the rest of us – both those who need our medical system today and those who currently work in it – the path to computerization will be strewn with landmines, large and small. The challenges are everywhere. Medicine, our most intimately human profession, is being dehumanized by the entry of the computer into the exam room. While computers are preventing many medical errors, they are also causing new kinds of mistakes, some of them whoppers. Sensors and monitors are throwing off mountains of data, often leading to more cacophony than clarity. Patients are now in the loop – many get to see their laboratory and pathology results before their doctor does; some are even reading their doctor’s notes – yet are woefully unprepared to handle their hard-fought empowerment.

In short, while someday the computerization of medicine will undoubtedly be that long-awaited “disruptive innovation,” today it’s often just plain disruptive: of the doctor-patient relationship, clinicians’ professional interactions and workflow, and the way we measure and try to improve things. I’d never heard the term “unanticipated consequences” in my professional world until a few years ago, and now we use it all the time, since we – yes, even the insiders – are constantly astonished by the speed with which things are changing and the unpredictability of the results.

Before we go any further, it’s important that you understand that I am all for the computerization of healthcare. I bought my first Mac in 1984, back when one inserted and ejected floppy disks so often (“Insert Excel Disk 2”) that the machine felt more like an infuriating toaster than a sparkling harbinger of a new era. Today, I can’t live without my MacBook Pro, iPad, iPhone, Facetime, Twitter, OpenTable, and Evernote. I even blog and tweet. In other words, I am a typical, electronically overendowed American.

And healthcare needs to be disrupted. Despite being staffed with (mostly) well trained and committed doctors and nurses, our system delivers evidence-based care about half the time, kills a jumbo jet’s worth of patients each day from medical mistakes, and is bankrupting the country. Patients and policymakers are no longer willing to tolerate the status quo, and they’re right.