My wife of 47 years likes to tell of her travails after having married me. She claims she had no inkling that I would specialize in despised career choices. Right after we were married, I served as an infantry airborne officer in Viet Nam, a then despised profession. Then I became a trial lawyer. A very despised profession. And then in 2004, I became the CEO of a health insurer, the pinnacle of my career in despised professions. At one point she stopped reading the Providence Journal and listening to local talk radio. When asked if she were my wife, she’d often reply, “Why do you want to know?”
So I have some perspective on emotional reactions of people in varied contexts. Here we will discuss the hyper-emotionalism that lawsuits engender, because they indeed cause people to act in ways that are confounding. Of course, an individual plaintiff in a medical malpractice lawsuit is hyper-emotionally involved. But more to the point of this article, so is the defendant physician.
Why is that? For the plaintiff, that’s easy to understand. They believe (or were convinced) that the physician harmed them through negligent conduct, and that they should be compensated (and perhaps apologized to). Their world often starts to revolve around the lawsuit as if nothing else mattered. It consumes them, and the outcome is rarely satisfying.
The physician reacts almost equally emotionally when sued. While that is counterproductive, they typically can’t help themselves because it is a direct and personal attack going to the heart of who and what they are professionally and as human beings. Heavy stuff.
In my personal time away from my role at Deloitte, I am a private pilot and passionate volunteer for a charity that facilitates free air transportation for children and adults with medical conditions who need to get to treatment far from home. In my interactions with these patients I hear how important communication is to their well-being. I also hear how outreach from life sciences companies enables improvements in their lives and puts them back at the center of the health ecosystem.
If concepts could get awards, then “risk factor” would surely be a Nobel prize winner. Barely over 50 years of age, it enjoys such an important place in medicine that I suspect most of us doctors could hardly imagine practicing without it. Yet, clearly, the concept is not native to our profession nor is its success entirely justified.
Quality is all the rage in health care these days. It rolls off the presidential tongue and is at the heart of robust targets set by Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell. (No less than half of all Medicare payments to be quality based by the end of 2018!)
An expert panel convened by the World Health Organization just declared that there is no scientific basis for canceling, postponing or moving the 28th Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in August or the Paralympics in September because of the Zika outbreak. While many of us experts have expressed concerns about how the WHO handled Ebola and other outbreaks, this time the WHO got it right.
In the United States, we have historically invested far more in treating sickness than we do in maintaining health. The result of this imbalance is not only poorer health, but more money spent in institutions, hospitals, and nursing homes.
Some have suggested that my comments over the past few months about the Meaningful Use program, MACRA/MIPS, and Certification imply that we should just give up – throw out the baby with the bath water.
