Physician Communication – The Health Care Blog

Physicians’ Communication Skills are Overlooked and Undervalued

Oct 2, 2020

By HANS DUVEFELT

Interviewing celebrities can make you a celebrity yourself, and it can make you very rich. So there’s got to be something to it or it would be a commodity. The world of media certainly recognizes the special skill it takes to get people to reveal their true selves.

At the other end of the spectrum of human communication lies our ability to explain and also our ability to influence. These three aspects of what we do—elicit, explain and influence—are far from trivial, and in my opinion quite fundamental aspects of practicing medicine.

Eliciting an accurate patient history or administering standardized depression, anxiety, domestic abuse, smoking and alcohol screenings are commoditized activities in today’s healthcare. There is little time allotted and these tasks are usually delegated to non-clinicians.

A complicated patient’s clinical history seldom lends itself to straightforward, structured EHR formats. It can be more like a novel, where seemingly unrelated subplots converge and suddenly make complete sense in a surprising last chapter.

Can Interactive Group Therapy Boost Productivity in Medicine?

Apr 27, 2017

By DEVON HERRICK

Imagine attending private lectures and taking all your college exams in your professors’ offices individually, one-on-one. Your instructors lecture you, then pepper you with questions, grading your answers and recording your scores. This is not unlike traditional physician visits. Contrast this to attending classroom lectures and taking online multiple choice exams where a computer algorithm or Scantron tallies your answers and calculates your grade. Classroom instruction with standardized testing is much more efficient that private tutoring. Hundreds of students can learn and take their online exams simultaneously. What if medical productivity could be similarly improved?

Inefficient Physician Communication. When you visit your doctor you are engaging in what’s known as synchronous communication. You queue up in a waiting room and later both you and your doctor meet one-on-one in an exam room (at the same time). You may spend five minutes talking to a nurse and then 10 minutes talking to a doctor. A survey found with waiting and travel time, the whole process takes patients about three hours, on average. Furthermore, many doctors see only about 20 to 25 patients a day. The amount of information conveyed during an office visit is limited — as is the amount of information patients retain. Doctors also must take notes and update medical records during the exam. Fiddling with electronic health records further reduces the amount of useful information exchanged during a 10-minute encounter while your doctor hunts for pull-down menus. The way medicine is practiced is inherently labor intensive, not to mention inconvenient for patients.

Synchronous telemedicine is where you call your doctor or he/she calls back and you talk one-on-one. That may be a little more convenient for patients, but it’s still labor intensive. Asynchronous telemedicine is like email (or snail mail for that matter). You email your doctor or call your doctor and leave a message. Your doctor replies via email or by leaving voicemail. Asynchronous communication doesn’t require both parties to be present at the same time to communicate, but the information flow back and forth can be slow and inhibited compared to talking.