“Fashion Is Moving Too Fast, and It’s Killing Creativity,” by Veronique Hyland, talks about burnout in the fashion industry. As a former Fashion Designer turn physician, my curiosity was peaked. If you substituted the word “medicine” …
Category: primary care
Uber and Lyft are playing larger roles for Medicaid
Arizona Medicaid Director Jami Snyder heard many complaints about enrollees missing medical appointments because the transportation provided by the state didn’t show or came too late. So this summer she hatched a solution familiar to millions of Americ…
20 minutes isn’t long enough for an office visit
As many of you know, if you’ve read my columns regularly, once a year the whole family escapes from the city, and we travel up to New Hampshire to stay at the lake house that’s been in my wife’s family for over 100 years. A modest woo…
Religion and spirituality are in the exam room
Religion and spirituality play a role in both patient’s and provider’s lives. Despite this, medical school is usually an atheistic experience. I went to a state-run medical school. No consideration of religion happened throughout my entire medical scho…
Is automation the anti-workaround?
Anyone who has spent any time on the internet knows better than to spend much time on the comments from an opinion piece. The comments section, even one on a site as reputable and respected as the New York Times, is often a minefield of trolls, contrar…
Primary care could hold the key to preventing Alzheimer’s disease
To delay or prevent the onset of memory loss, talk to your doctor. It can really be that simple. Among the diseases that Americans fear most, Alzheimer’s and dementia consistently rank at the top of the list. What people don’t always realize is that ma…
The answer to physician burnout isn’t resilience training
The answer to physician burnout is purported to be resilience training. That’s like glorifying the natural ability of frogs to tolerate gradually heating and boiling water. Unfortunately, health care today has some toxic ingredients, and physician burn…
Doctors, do you really understand?
There is a haze lurking overhead clouding rational thinking. Thoughts wander back to times when my body was unencumbered, and I felt nothing was out of my grasp. Maybe that was an unrealistic thought, but it is how youth and inexperience protect one f…
Here’s why health care innovations stay secret
Having been an improvement advisor with many quality improvement initiatives and collaboratives, I have observed that stories about successful initiatives too often leave out major relational barriers that got in the way as well as the critical interve…
Who actually owns your medical records?
I was in a discussion with a group of patients about how difficult it is for patients to get access to their own medical records. It was initiated after one of my patients was refused copies of her recent hospitalization. There is much confusion out th…
