A short piece in The Health Care Blog reveals (albeit unintentionally) why so many outside of healthcare think the medical establishment still doesn’t get it.
The post, written by a general internist and residency program director, asked why an increasing number of internal medicine doctors are failing their internal medicine board exams. The pass rate has reportedly declined over the last several years from 90% to 84%. (Disclosure: I passed this required test about a decade ago.)
His differential included two possibilities:
(1) The test is getting harder – The testing agency said this wasn’t the case.
(2) Millennials lack the study habits of their elders, and have become great “looker-upers.” – The author suggested this was a key factor, and several commentators enthusiastically agreed.
The basic thesis here that in the Days of Giants, doctors worked harder, learned more, and were better. Nowadays, doctors are relatively complacent, less invested, less informed, and are generally worse – which is what’s reflected on the board exams.
Let me suggest a third possibility – perhaps today’s doctors are providing better care to patients than their predecessors were a generation ago. Maybe today’s doctors have figured out that in our information age, your ability to regurgitate information is less important than your ability to access data and intelligently process it. Maybe what makes you a truly effective doctor isn’t your ability to assert dominance by the sheer number of facts you’ve amassed, but rather how well you are able to lead a care team, and ensure each patient receives the best care possible.
In other words, what if the problem isn’t the doctors, who are appropriately adapting, but rather the tests (and the medical establishment), which may not be?