As a practicing primary care doctor, I very much believe that better care is when patients are engaged and share decision making with their doctor. Though in the past doctors treated patients in a paternalistic manner, my generation of doctors has been taught to uphold a balanced doctor-patient relationship and partnership. This change in balance of power has accelerated with the ease and availability of information via the internet. More patients not only are asking about diagnoses and treatments, but correctly self-diagnosing. They merely come by to check in with me to make sure they got it right and to clarify the treatment options. Overall, this is better patient care. However, over the past few years a trend has gotten more momentum. As health care becomes increasingly unaffordable, many believe quality and costs would improve if we treated health care like other markets where consumers drive health care. If only […] Read More »
Author Archives: Davis
Physician Leaders I Admire – Bob Wachter, UCSF
Posted on May 16, 2013
Recently while following my twitter feed, I noticed the following from an associate editor from The Health Care Blog who quoted Dr. Lucian Leape, Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Leape wondered why the patient safety movement hadn’t moved. He noted four reasons: Doctor resistance Doctors don’t do teams Difficult culture. No leadership. Though I did not attend the conference where Dr. Leape spoke, the answer seemed pretty obvious. To solve the problem you need leadership. It is leadership that defines the culture, whether teamwork is valued, and whether change occurs. The reason health care has not moved forward quickly enough simply because there has been a void of physician leadership across the entire health care system. There have been plenty of initiatives to improve patient safety over the past decade since the Institute of Medicine “To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System“, but as stories demonstrate many of […] Read More »
David Goldhill Replies to My Post “Disappointing, Dangerous, Frightening” on His Interview on Healthcare
Posted on May 9, 2013
David Goldhill, CEO of the and author of the September 2009 Atlantic titled How American Health Care Killed My Father and book titled, Catastrophic Care – How American Health Care Killed My Father — and How We Can Fix It, recently responded to my post – Malcolm Gladwell and David Goldhill Interview on Health Care – Disappointing, Dangerous, Frightening His comments in his entirety: While I’m appreciative that you came to hear Malcolm and I discuss health care, you really don’t seem to understand much of what we were talking about. My work is an attempt to think about health care as an industry, and using comparisons to how other industries behave to understand why health care delivers such mixed performance — with extraordinarily high rates of error — at such high cost. My argument is a systemic one: bad industrial outcomes are a result of badly structured economic incentives; […] Read More »
Abraham Verghese, Vinod Khosla, Robert Pearl – The Future of Healthcare – Stanford Innovation Summit
Posted on May 3, 2013
I recently jumped at the opportunity to attend the 2013 Healthcare Innovation Summit at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Subtitled IT-Enabled Disruption, it featured opening keynote speaker Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini, Stanford psychologist and lecturer Dr. Kelly McGonigal, and many other interesting people asking – how do we change health care? I knew little of Mr. Bertolini and nothing of Dr. McGonigal and the former made me think differently about the role of insurers in the new health care reform world and the latter reinforced my belief that the current trend in pushing the complete onus of health squarely on the individual may be too simplistic. But for me, the real reason for going was to hear three of the most fascinating people in health care. First, Dr. Abraham Verghese, Professor for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at Stanford, who is world renowned for his belief in the sacred […] Read More »
2013 – Year of the Physician Leader
Posted on April 8, 2013
In a time of crisis is when leaders step forward. If our nation faces one crisis, then it is that of the health care system which increasingly is unaffordable and trails other industrialized countries in quality and access. If there was a time leadership was needed then it would be now. As doctors, we should be providing this leadership. No longer can we let others dictate how health care should look. No longer can we simply abdicate responsibility to our patients by claiming that how much treatments or therapies cost are not our issue or our concern. As healers we need to do more than ever. If there is optimism for our future, then it is due to the examples set by health care organizations that are actively solving the issues of cost, quality, and access and the commensurate rise of physician leadership, which is increasingly apparent through engagement with […] Read More »
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