Patient Advocacy and Unraveling the Realities of Our Disjointed, Profit-Driven Healthcare System
Many of us go into medicine to help people. When we start practicing medicine and understand that the system in which we work is disjointed from the corporate model of healthcare, it can lead to burnout, moral injury, and it does affect patient care.
Medicine has become a business model based on productivity. How do we measure productivity when we are dealing with a person? When we are dealing with someone’s health?
How can health be quantified?
How can the work we do, as physicians, other clinicians, and ancillary staff be measured truly?
Instead of treating people, it has taken away the art of medicine. Instead, the healing is all about treating a disease with a cookie cutter answer.
I refuse to let the art of medicine die, as most other physicians I know. The disease, within a person, is diagnosed, and the treatment should be tailored. Each individual has different barriers, whether it be financial, emotional, psychological, etc.
How can such barriers and possibly limiting beliefs be known in an 8 minute visit [assuming 15 minute visit, check-in and rooming time takes nearly 50%]?
How can a patient truly be evaluated in each individual complexity in such a short amount of time?
How does a patient divulge vulnerable information and feel safe within 8 minutes?
May be this model has led to depersonalization and barely lifting our heads up to acknowledge the patient’s humanity. If I don’t acknowledge it, it may not exist? {I do not believe this, but trying to generate discussion, ideas on how we got here}. Patients do see, as do their families, how disjointed and broken the system is.
Pack Your Own Healthcare Parachute: A Physician’s Death Through His Daughter’s Eyes is a beautiful story of an adored husband and father of three, revered physician turned patient, caught in a web of today’s dysfunctional medical system and requiring advocacy. In the boo Shiella Dowlatshahi, a first-generation American, tells her father’s story, his passion, and commitment to patients, and the heartbreaking journey endured by their family during her father’s devastating illness.
