Poor communication in medicine can kill.
I wrote a piece a few years ago on the issue (What we have in health care today is a failure to communicate), and fellow primary care doctor Rob Lamberts revisits the topic in a recent post.
In fact, he goes one further, saying not only does it cost money, “It kills. Patients have died because of this.”
Hospitals and emergency rooms rarely have access to primary care records, and in turn, primary care offices usually have trouble receiving discharge summaries from inpatient admissions. This leads to fragmented care, repeated tests, and gaps in the patient record.
Dr. Rob points out a strange irony, saying, “we live in a time where communication is easier than ever before and when information is easily accessed. Through my blog, Facebook, and Twitter, I have made friends, have renewed friendships, and have communicated my thoughts to an enormous number of people.”
His solution? Re-align the incentives, and remove the obstacles to open health communication. Not only encourage doctors to use well-designed digital systems, remove the inane privacy laws that impede collaborative sharing of health information, and provide the proper incentives for physicians to promote better communication with each other.
Makes sense to me.
Related posts:
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- Should doctors talk politics with patients?
- Should hospitals use Twitter to follow patients?
- When fat doctors talk to obese patients
- Should patients lie to their doctors?
- Hospitals are using social media, like Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, for advertising to patients
- CNN recommends following @KevinMD on Twitter
{ 6 comments }
Excellent point re: physician communication. Couple with this communication challenges at hand-off among care units and errors escalate. At correctional facilities, we struggled almost uniformly with the misinterpretation of HIPAA such that hospital personnel are unwilling to share treatment information to the recieving nurse in the correctional facility when inmates return from inpatient care.
“Re-align the incentives, and remove the obstacles to open health communication. Not only encourage doctors to use well-designed digital systems, remove the inane privacy laws that impede collaborative sharing of health information, and provide the proper incentives for physicians to promote better communication with each other.”
Apparently this should all be done on someone else’s dime? Physicians aren’t going to do it on their own?
It is also true that patients die when patients don’t communicate with their health care providers.
In light of the earlier post about patients lying to their doctors because adverse information in their health records will cause denial of health insurance, or sanctions by legal authorities, don’t those incentives need to be “re-aligned” too?
One acronym: HIPAA. Kind of a discussion ender.
Anon:
No, they won’t. Physicians are about taking care of the patients they are seeing at the time. Restructuring a system is not the job for individual clinicians. A system that discourages communication is the problem. Saying that “docs are all selfish” because we don’t all work together is ignorant of human nature. Docs are no more noble than anyone else; they are trying to do their job, but with limited time and resources (I am talking about primary care here, but most every doctor is quite busy) will give time to what is at hand.
Tom: HIPAA is not the discussion-ender any more than the FCC is of online banking. Communication has to happen at a level that respects privacy. That is not an impossible task; but it IS improbable when doctors have to lose money if they do it.
when patients die because doctors don’t talk to each other then those doctors are supposed to be judged by the board of registration. if the patient’s family is kept in the dark then the beat goes on and the quack who didn’t specify the dose of a med or a colonoscopy prep leaving it to a pharmacist or a nurse only to have the patient die , well that doctor who doesn’t communicate very well keeps up their killing until someone else communicates that this doctor shouldn’t be practicing any where.i wonder how many get away with murder when their peers don’t want to talk and the patients family doesn’t ask the right questions. this might not happen in a large teaching hospital where there are many checks and balances but, in the smaller community hospitals i bet it happens more than is reported. the systems are already here but fear and vested interest seem to keep this from happening. open the books, and, open the door and let the light in. then sweep the dirt out.
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