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iPatient and Physician Work Circa 2016

November 18, 2016 7:00 am

An interesting commentary (DI Rosenthal, A Verghese. NEJM 2016; 375: 1813-5) provides a closer glimpse into the meaning and nature of physicians’ work at this time.

Key points:

Medical students and residents spend 40-50% of their day in front of a computer & much of the rest of their day on the phone (coordinating care).
Time spent with patients “has remained stable over the past six decades.”
Flipping through the electronic record before seeing patients is commonplace but can lead to a ‘framing bias.’
“Our attention is so frequently diverted from the lives, bodies, and souls of the people entrusted to our care”…”despite all the rhetoric about ‘patient-centered care,’ the patient is not at the center of things.”
The authors equate the digital representation of the patient as an ‘iPatient.’
Physicians are “resentful of the time required to transcribe and translate information.”
Higher satisfaction is associated with perceptions of higher quality of care.
The authors advocate working on “rebuilding our practices and physical spaces to promote human connections that can sustain us — between physicians and patients, physicians and physicians, and physicians and nurses.”

My take: The authors provide a closer glimpse of the problem showing how our digital health has hindered meaningful interactions that go to the heart of medicine –to provide comfort and care.

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