I woke up to the sound of a faint “ding” from my bedside table. It was 5:24 a.m. Shaking off my lethargy, I scrambled over to my phone because the ding meant one thing: my first residency interview invitation. Looking back on that moment, as I responded in the dim light of the morning, I […]
Recently I was saying goodnight to my oldest son, who is now 14 and about to enter high school. I was standing in his bedroom looking at his midnight blue walls, which are covered in each of the planets. He looked up at me from his Pottery Barn bunk bed and said, “Mom, I need […]
A natural part of life is emotionally growing (hopefully) with experience. If I was to look back at my own journey, when I was in medical school and just graduating, I would say that without doubt, one of the biggest things I would tell my younger self, would be to not take things too personally. This […]
I have a theory. There is a simple thing hospitalists can do that can enhance relationships with our patients, and even, I bet, improve patient satisfaction scores. The catch is it is not something you can do for yourself; you can only “pay it forward” for somebody else. We know patients who trust their physicians […]
What makes a good doctor or, for that matter, a great one? Most patients want physicians who are excellent clinicians and diagnosticians. But we also want doctors who are caring, empathetic and maybe even telepathic — doctors who seem to know intuitively what we need without any awkward discussion of sensitive issues. After all, patients […]
The trouble began when I needed to open the electronic health record (EHR) system for the tenth time that day. EHRs have significantly changed the way we practice medicine. They have completely eliminated the need for storage and transport of paper charts, reduced prescription errors secondary to illegible handwritings of physicians and provided an excellent […]
Mr. Smith was a sixty-eight-year-old man who came to the Veterans Affairs hospital where I was a medical student complaining of chest pain. “With chest pain, it’s all about the story,” my resident, the physician in charge of our team, said. We talked to him to find out what he was doing when it started, […]
With the transition to residency, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about next steps in my career. I even did a self-reflection exercise for a class in which I listed out professional decisions that will come up in the next few years (including choices like fellowship selection, type of practice setting, whether to pursue […]
When we studied ward attending rounds, the thought process represented the top attribute that learners valued. Learners can learn facts from textbooks, but using those facts requires experience and role modeling. I have given many lectures on clinical reasoning, and I have attended many lectures on clinical reasoning. These lectures can entertain, but one lecture […]
“Better patient care” is the reason hospital and health systems usually give when they merge or acquire one another. Our research suggests that mergers and affiliations might, paradoxically, increase the risk of harm to patients in the short run. Improving the safety of patient care is possible during mergers and affiliations, but requires intentional efforts. […]
