Brain Blogger writes on why communication is so poor in medicine. One reason is that physicians are discouraged from spending time with patients, which “sets the stage” for miscommunication. Rushed visits lead to important pieces of information to be overlooked.

Medicine is also becoming increasingly specialized, with the average Medicare patient seeing 5 to 10 doctors annually. Like a game of broken phone tag, the more doctors that are involved in a case, the greater the chance for communication breakdown.

And it doesn’t help that that we have a hodge-podge of paper and incompatible electronic records. Too much poorly-sorted data which only adds to the confusion.

We need less cooks stirring the pot and a move towards a more generalist-based system. My take on this topic was published earlier this year: What we have in health care today is a failure to communicate.