A Doctor Thanks His Mentor - Steve Jobs

I've been reading A Game Plan for Life: The Power of Mentoring written by famed UCLA basketball coach John Wooden.  Wooden spends half of his book thanking the people who had a powerful influence on his life, coaching, philosophy, and outlook on life.  Important people included his father, coaches, President Abraham Lincoln, and Mother Theresa.

Yes, President Abraham Lincoln and Mother Theresa.

Though clearly he could have never met the former and didn't have the opportunity to meet the latter, Wooden correctly points out that as individuals we can be mentored by the writings, words, and thoughts of people we have never and will likely never meet.

Which seems like the most opportune time to thank one of my mentors, founder and former CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs.

Now, I have never met nor will I ever meet Steve Jobs.  Lest you think I'm a devoted Apple fan, I never bought anything from Apple until the spring of 2010.  Their products though beautifully designed were always too expensive.  I'm just a little too frugal.  I know technology well enough that people mistaken me for actually knowing what to do when a computer freezes or crashes.  Yet, the value proposition was never compelling enough until the release of the first generation iPad.  Then the iPhone 4.  Finally the Macbook Air last Christmas.

No, thanking Steve Jobs isn't about the amazing magical products that have changed my life as well as millions of others.  It's more than that.  What he has mentored me on is vision, perspective, persistence, and leadership.  Nowhere is this more important than the world I operate in, the world of medicine.  Increasingly health care is fragmented, confusing, and frustrating for patients.  As Dr. Atul Gawande noted in his commencement to Harvard Medical School:

Everyone has just a piece of patient care. We’re all specialists now—even primary-care doctors. A structure that prioritizes the independence of all those specialists will have enormous difficulty achieving great care.

We don’t have to look far for evidence. Two million patients pick up infections in American hospitals, most because someone didn’t follow basic antiseptic precautions. Forty per cent of coronary-disease patients and sixty per cent of asthma patients receive incomplete or inappropriate care. And half of major surgical complications are avoidable with existing knowledge. It’s like no one’s in charge—because no one is. The public’s experience is that we have amazing clinicians and technologies but little consistent sense that they come together to provide an actual system of care, from start to finish, for people.

We don't have an actual system of care.  A majority of doctors still use paper charts and prescription pads which can be difficult to access or decipher (doctors have poor penmanship?) and communicate with colleagues via letters, faxes, and phone calls.  In an industry which is information driven, this seems too antiquated to be true.  Hospitals each have their own unique system of care and their is little standardization which means both patients and doctors need to learn new rules with each new hospital.  Patients cannot invest in long term relationships with their doctors because they change jobs, their company or their doctors dropped their previous insurance plan.

What we have is a potpourri of doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, and health insurers cobbled together to form a "health care system".  For a patient, the number of combinations is staggering.  Each experience varies depending on who they see, what insurance coverage they have, and the type of (or lack of) information technology their doctors have.  Many doctors today still bristle at the possibility that they actually need to email their patients and as a result don't offer that as a way of communication or education.

In the end, what patients and doctors really want sits at the intersection of humanity and technology.  Patients want doctors who know them as individuals, use medical technology thoughtfully, and a system that is highly reliable, safe, and focused on them to stay well or get them better.  Doctors want patients who are partners in their care, technology that enables them to get the accurate information they need real-time, and a system that is streamlined to allow doctors to be healers.

In other words, we need a better health care system for both parties.

As a practicing primary care doctor, his words inspire me to help work towards creating a system which "simply works" for both doctors and patients.  Some of the most important quotes that has shaped my thinking include:

“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.”
— Fortune, Nov. 9, 1998

“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
— BusinessWeek, May 25 1998

“It comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much.”
— BusinessWeek Online, Oct. 12, 2004

“Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?”
— The line he used to lure John Sculley as Apple’s CEO, according to Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple, by John Sculley and John Byrne

"So you can't go out and ask people, you know, what the next big [thing.] There's a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, 'If I'd have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me "A faster horse." ' " -- CNN / Money

"My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects. And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be." -- CNN / Money

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary." -- Stanford 2005 commencement address

Many of my blog posts have reflected on whether health care can indeed be better than it currently exists much the same way Jobs has redefined how we as a society communicate, relate, receive, and create content.

Does America Want Apple or Android for Health Care? 

What Steve Jobs and iPhone 4 Antennagate can Teach Doctors and Patients

Why Healthcare Needs to be More Like Apple and Less Like Windows / Intel 

I as a doctor I'm incredibly sorry that medicine has not yet evolved to the point that a cure exists for the rare type of cancer Jobs.  I'm sorry that he is so ill at an incredibly young age, in his mid 50s, when many people begin to contribute even more to society with all of the knowledge and experience they've acquired.  The future might be a little less bright without Jobs leading his team at Apple on creating products and experiences none of us truly knew existed until he showed them to us.

And yet, I wanted to thank him for his mentoring.  Clearly though the outpouring of comments and support across the web, Steve Jobs has had a profound influence in many of our lives.  In most cases, it wasn't even about the products.

It was simply a way of living and viewing life.

I look forward to learning one last time from my mentor this fall with the release of his book titled Steve Jobs. 

My thoughts are with him, his family, and the people at Apple who continue to innovate and challenge themselves so the rest of us benefit.

NY Times - Finding a Quality Doctor - Why the Author and Doctors Are Wrong.

The New York Times recently published an article titled, Finding a Quality Doctor, Dr. Danielle Ofri an internist at NYU, laments how she was unable to perform as well as expected in the areas of patient care as it related to diabetes.  From the August 2010 New England Journal of Medicine article, Dr. Ofri notes that her report card showed the following - 33% of patients with diabetes have glycated hemoglobin levels at goal, 44% have cholesterol levels at goal, and a measly 26% have blood pressure at goal.  She correctly notes that these measurements alone aren't what makes a doctor a good quality one, but rather the areas of interpersonal skills, compassion, and empathy, which most of us would agree constitute a doctor's bedside manner, should count as well. 

Her article was simply to illustrate that "most doctors are genuinely doing their best to help their patients and that these report cards might not be accurate reflections of their care" yet when she offered this perspective, a contrary point of view, many viewed it as "evidence of arrogance."

She comforted herself by noting that those who criticized her were "mostly [from] doctors who were not involved in direct patient care (medical administrators, pathologists, radiologists). None were in the trenches of primary care."

From the original NEJM article, Dr. Ofri concluded when it related to the care of patients with diabetes and her report card -

I don't even bother checking the results anymore. I just quietly push the reports under my pile of unread journals, phone messages, insurance forms, and prior authorizations. It's too disheartening, and it chips away at whatever is left of my morale. Besides, there are already five charts in my box — real patients waiting to be seen — and I need my energy for them. 

As a practicing primary care doctor, I'm afraid that Dr. Ofri and many other doctors are making a fundamental attribution error is assuming that somehow doctors can't do both.  She is also wrong in thinking that the real patients waiting to be seen are somehow more important that those whose blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugars are poorly controlled and the disease literally eats them up from the inside which could result in end organ damage to the eyes (blindness), kidneys (renal failure resulting in dialysis), extremities (amputation), and heart (coronary artery disease) and possibly premature death.  They aren't in the office and yet are suffering.

Until we as doctors begin to take responsibility for our performance in hard clinical and objective outcomes like glycated hemoglobin levels, cholesterol, and blood pressure, our patients will pay a price.  We should not pretend that bedside manner should trump clinical outcomes nor that clinical outcomes should override the humanistic part of medicine.

It is possible to do both today.  It isn't theoretical.  I only serve as one example.


I'm a front-line primary care doctor who also takes care of patients. I like Dr. Ofri also get a report card on my performance in caring for patients with diabetes.

Based on the medical evidence, my goals are set similarly to hers. For 2010, my performance wasn’t perfect but was 88.6%, 80.8%, and 70% at goal respectively.

I suspect critics will immediately begin to make a lot of assumptions of how these scores were achieved, when Dr. Ofri, another primary care doctor had very different outcomes.  Is it that I am not a quality doctor? Perhaps I’m too driven by data and have no - “soft” attributes like attentiveness, curiosity, compassion, diligence, connection and communication.  Perhaps I "fire" those patients who are not able to achieve good outcomes.

I can tell you many patients wish to join my practice and rarely do people choose to leave it.  The organization I work for also takes the softer side of medicine, a doctor’s bedside manner, seriously.  My employer randomly surveys patients on their experience. Does your doctor listen and explain? Do they know your medical history? Do they partner with you in your health? Do you have confidence in the care they provided you?

For 2010, 92.8 percent rated me very good or excellent on these elements.

So what does this all mean?

We should not automatically assume that doctors with great bedside manner cannot also provide great clinical care.

I can achieve the goals, which patients would want, and still be a doctor with great bedside manner because I work in a functional system like Kaiser Permanente. Primary care doctors are blessed with a comprehensive electronic medical record, are partnered with staff who help patients get the care they need, and are surrounded by specialty colleagues equally as focused to keep patients healthy and well.

So if there is any area of agreement with Dr. Ofri it is that simply giving doctors report cards and telling them to try harder will simply achieve mediocre outcomes.  Until there is a fundamental restructuring on health care is delivered (and simply making appointments longer isn't necessarily going to solve it either), then primary care doctors will continue to leave the specialty in droves.  Doctors need to lead change and use tools and skills honed in other industries, whether the Toyota Production model or lean process, which has been utilized by the Virginia Mason Hospital, or usage of protocols and checklists based on scientific evidence as demonstrated by Intermountain Healthcare and Dr. Brent James.

Until we as doctors lead, we cannot or should not expect improvement in patient outcomes.  We can no longer hide behind the reasons of our Herculean effort or bedside manner as what should really matter and account for something.  Patients expect these attributes intuitively.

With already so many examples of success in the country marrying the art, science, and humanistic part of medicine, the only thing stopping us to re-invent American medicine in the 21st century is simply ourselves.

Newsweek - Just Say No! - One Word Can Save Your Life. Too Simplistic. Doctors Need to Help.

Newsweek has a very provocative and yet incredibly too simplistic piece for the public and patients on its cover story - One Word Can Save Your Life: No! - New research shows how some common tests and procedures aren’t just expensive, but can do more harm than good.

The piece is actually well written and highlights facts that have been apparent for some time.  More intervention and treatment isn't necessarily better.  Having a cardiac catheterization or open heart surgery for patients with stable heart disease and mild chest pain isn't better than diet, exercise, and the prescription medication treatment.  PSA, the blood test previously suggested by many professional organizations, isn't helpful to screen for prostate cancer, even though the value of the test was questioned years ago.  Antibiotics for sinus infection?  Usually not helpful.

Certainly doctors do bear part of the blame.  If patients are getting routine colonoscopies sooner than every 10 years or are getting them despite being quite a bit older (80 and older) and frail, then clearly patients should say no to more care.  More isn't better.  (Whether a patient has the conviction to do so is another story.  When my auto mechanic says it is time to change the brakes or change the oil, who am I to say no?)

But the overtreatment and overuse of medical technology does not just fall on the doctors.  It is also the patients' and the public's perception of what is the right care.  Whether this perception was shaped by doctors, the media, movies and television shows, or patients comparing notes is hard to say, but the reality is patients have a certain expectation of what should be done which often is in stark contrast to the right thing to do.  For low back pain, many patients simply want a MRI and avoid an examination or visit.  After all, isn't the truth in the MRI?  Isn't talking to a patient and examining his back, knee and ankle reflexes, evaluating for joint strength and sensation simply from a by-gone era that is antiquated in the 21st century?  Do patients know the limitations of our understanding not in the history or physical examination honed by generations of doctors before us, but the shiny new piece of technology rolled out annually by General Electric?  As Dr. Michael Lauer, a cardiologist of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute noted in the piece, “Our imaging and diagnostic tests are so good, we can see things we couldn’t see before...But our ability to understand what we’re seeing and to know if we should intervene hasn’t kept up.”

Doctors who do provide the right care, which often is low tech and common sense, might be viewed as denying care.  If a patient has chest pain which is easily treated with a statin (cholesterol lowering) drug and beta-blocker and a cardiologist is not needed for further intervention, do you think the patient or the family will feel more relieved or more anxious?  If a stress test isn't offered to an otherwise healthy middle aged man as part of a physical (or at a minimum an EKG) and yet is offered the identical tests as part of an executive physical, do you think the public at large will feel better or worse in not having the tests, which are correctly noted in the article not proven to save lives?  (It is ironic that although fantastic experts are quoted in the piece including Dr. Steven Nissen, a cardiologist at Cleveland Clinic, his organization offers executive physicals, which you guessed it provide many of these tests and interventions to paying clients.  Though the results of the majority of the tests are normal it is that remote possibility that something might be wrong and the basis of the testimonials on the website that have the public clamoring for more testing and treatments).

In today's society where news is disseminated as sound bites or tweets, I am concerned about the unintended implications this Newsweek story will bring: patients will say no to everything.  Based on a well written, though not entirely balanced article, patients will anchor their decisions to default to no based on this small piece of information.  It has already occurred with vaccinations.  As the National Committee for Quality Assurance noted in its 2010 State of Health Care Quality report, childhood immunization rates for those in private insurance has actually fallen compared to those in public insurance (Medicaid) plans.

Childhood vaccination rates in 2009 declined by almost four percentage points in commercial plans.
   
A possible cause of this drop is commercial plan parents may refuse vaccines for their children based on the unproven, but increasingly popular, notion that vaccines cause autism. Celebrity activists are outspoken advocates of this view. Interestingly, we see vaccination rates in Medicaid – the program serving the poor – continuing to steadily improve.  

“The drop in childhood vaccinations is disturbing because parents are rejecting valuable treatment based on misinformation,” said NCQA President Margaret E. O’Kane. “All of us in health care need to work together to get better information to the public.”
The State of Health Care Quality Report examined quality data from over 1,000 health plans that collectively cover 118 million Americans.

Because of the complexity, nuances, and ever changing nature of medicine, patients more than ever need doctors to lead and be firm on what works and what does not.  The anecdotal quote by a doctor who opted not to have a mammogram should be taken as one person's opinion and not a recommendation for all women to do the same.  Having patients say no or expecting them to make the right decisions for themselves and family is not how the country will get better care.  A recent NY Times piece by Dr. Pauline Chen titled Letting Doctors Make Tough Decisions could not have been more timely.

... a new study reveals that too much physician restraint may not be all that good for the patient — and perhaps may even be unethical. While doctors might equate letting patients make their own decisions with respect, a large number of patients don’t see it that way. In fact, it appears that a majority of patients are being left to make decisions that they never wanted to in the first place….

The challenges appear to arise not when the medical choices are obvious, but when the best option for a patient is uncertain. In these situations, when doctors pass the burden of decision-making to a patient or family, it can exacerbate an already stressful situation. “If a physician with all of his or her clinical experience is feeling that much uncertainty,” Dr. Curlin said, “imagine what kind of serious anxiety and confusion the patient and family may be feeling.”

Medical choices are not as obvious.  Today the vast amount of information and choices are overwhelming.  The easy and natural thing to do is to run away or bury our heads in the sand, or simply say no when decisions are complex. 


The Newsweek article concludes -

Many doctors don’t seem to be getting the message about useless and harmful health care. Medicare pays them more than $100 million a year for screening colonoscopies; some 40 percent are for people in whom they will almost certainly harm more than help. Arthroscopic knee surgery for osteoarthritis is performed about 650,000 times a year; studies show that it, too, is no more effective than placebo treatment, yet taxpayers and private insurers pay for it. And although several large studies, including the Occluded Artery Trial in 2006, have shown that inserting a stent to prop open a blocked artery more than 24 hours after a heart attack does not improve survival rates or reduce the risk of another coronary compared with drugs alone, the practice continues at a rate of 100,000 such procedures a year, estimate researchers led by Dr. Judith Hochman, a cardiologist at New York University. “We’re killing more people than we’re saving with these procedures,” says UT’s Goodwin. “It’s as simple as that.”

Actually, I think doctors are getting the message as Dr. Atul Gawande noted in the June 2009, New Yorker piece Cost Conundrum.  Doctors are compensated more to do more.  Even medical students get the message.  Increasingly more are becoming specialists as reimbursement is far more lucrative in doing procedures than it is to simply talk and counsel patients.

The Newsweek piece tries to simplify the problem too easily by hinting to patients that saying no is a good thing rather than challenging patients to have an open-minded, important and thoughtful conversation about the advantages and disadvantages of having certain tests or treatments with their primary care doctor.  Of course since fewer medical students want to do primary care, my job and those of my colleagues in family medicine and internal medicine just got a lot harder.

Are Patients Becoming Day Traders?

Let me say first that I am a practicing primary care doctor who is very much focused on patient centered care.  Though I cannot go back to being a patient who is unaware about what a doctor does, the terminology she uses, or what the importance of certain test results are, I can empathize with the overwhelming amounts of information, challenges, and stressors patients and families can have in navigating the healthcare system to get the right care.  This is the reason I wrote my book.

However, over the past few months I've noticed a particularly disturbing trend.  Patients are not consulting doctors for advice, but rather demanding testing for diagnoses which are not even remote possibilities.  A little knowledge can be dangerous particularly in the context of little to no clinical experience.  Where many patients are today are where medical students are at the end of their second year - lots of book knowledge but little to no real world experience.

More patients are becoming the day traders of the dot.com boom.  Everyone has a hot stock tip, only now it is "be sure to ask your doctor for this test" or "ask for this medication because it is the only one that works".  Everyone is an expert with his own suggestion on what should be done.  If a medical expert, like a doctor, weighs in and does not agree, then there is a set of patients and doctors who begin to argue that these doctors are out of touch or arrogant.

Hardly.

I certainly agree that many doctors frown upon their patients doing research online.  I disagree with my colleagues.  I'm all for patients being partners in their health as long as when they research they also go to reputable websites, like the Mayo Clinic or Kaiser Permanente, and also give equal weight to my medical advice.  Ultimately, patients should be more knowledgeable about their health and engage not only with doctors, but with family and friends as health does not begin with doctors, but in households and communities.  However, today's world is increasingly polarized due to the ability to gather information and find opinions of like minded people quickly and easily.  A patient researching information can unwittingly blind themselves into believing that a medication, a treatment, a test, or a diagnosis is the only one that explains their symptoms. 

Many of the patients who Google their symptoms, do cursory research, and are so convinced that they have a particular problem and need a particular solution are the group I worry about the most.  They want to see a specialist for a problem adequately handled in primary care.  They want a branded medication when a generic medication works equally as well.  They want CT scans and MRIs for migraine headaches or sprained ankles when a generation ago, doctors and patients believed diagnoses based on common sense.  They decline vaccinations for preventable illnesses like pertussis, whooping cough, because they are healthy and don't want "chemicals" even though the state they live in had the worst outbreak of pertussis since 1955.

With more Americans paying for their health insurance through higher copays for doctor visits, medications, imaging, and treatment, it is understandable that they want more information and are seeking it.  What is particularly troubling, however, is much like the day traders of years ago, many are bypassing experts for some advice and consultation.  Indeed a decade ago many ridiculed financial guru Warren Buffet for failing to understanding the new world and being a dinosaur.  Principles of the past no longer applied.  (Of course, financials principles remained - you do need to make money to be an ongoing company).  As a front line doctor, I'm seeing the same phenomenon in health care.  Doctors still clinch the right diagnoses by talking to and then examining patients.  Skipping directly to lab work or imaging often gets the wrong answer.  Sometimes there is no test or imaging study that can get the diagnosis.  Yet somehow if asked, patients retort I don't have money to see you, I'd rather spend the money on the test or medication, so can you order it?

Like the day traders of a decade ago, these individuals have the illusion of control or mastery.  Only later do they discover when the results are normal and the problem remains that being an expert and having the ability to take in information, process it, and then come up with a plan is harder than it looks.  (Dr. Lisa Sanders, whose New York Times series Diagnosis was the inspiration for the television show House, M.D., has excellent patient cases which challenge the public on getting the right diagnosis).

That is not to say that there are not patients who are indeed experts.  The individuals who are leading the empowered patient movement often know a lot about their diagnoses and treatment options and have mutual respect from their doctors.  Enlightened doctors realize that they cannot know it all.  I would hope and believe that empowered patients also recognize this inherent problem in themselves as they also cannot know it all either.  It is the rich discussion and collaboration which occurs when both groups are on relatively equal footing in terms of knowledge that the answers, solutions, and treatment plans are far better than if only one side or the other led the conversation.  Those patient experts probably can and have identified their condition when they read it in Dr. Sander's column.

Who would have guessed that the day traders of the past would now appear as patients?  Funny and sad how history repeats itself.  The difference is unlike money the stakes are significantly higher when it comes to health.

Not sure what to do when you have a problem?  It's ok to research online, but then have an open mind when talking to your doctor.  If your doctor does not want to listen, then find another one.  Be sure, however, as you research and listen, that you do not become a day trader.  Indeed, if not done correctly the consumer driven health care movement has the potential to be equally as problematic as the retirement planning and investing movement a decade ago.

Required Reading for Medical Students, Interns, and Residents.

I have had the privilege of working at an organization which is actively improving the lives of its members and also was mentioned by the President as a model for the nation.  Over the past few years, I have also demonstrated to first year medical students what 21st century primary care should look and feel like - a fully comprehensive medical record, secure email to patients, support from specialists, and assistance from chronic conditions staff.

But as my students know, there are also some suggested reading assignments.  I'm not talking about Harrison's or other more traditional textbooks related to medical education.  If the United States is to have a viable and functioning health care system, then it will need every single physician to be engaged and involved.  I'm not just helping train the next group of doctors (and hopefully primary care doctors), but the next generation of physician leaders.

Here are the books listed in order of recommended reading, from easiest to most difficult.  Combined these books offer an understanding the complexity of the problem, the importance of language in diagnosing a patient, the mindset that we can do better, and the solution to fixing the health care system.

Which additional books or articles do you think current and future doctors should know?

Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer
Balanced and thoroughly researched, this book illustrates how the failings of our healthcare system are more complex than simply claiming that insurers are greedy and malpractice insurance premiums are too expensive.

Patients with the same illness are getting more costly medical care in certain parts of the country but actually do worse. The amount of medical care delivered is driven by the number of specialists, hospitals, and technology available in the community. The more doctors and hospitals add new services and technology the more likely those expensive services are used regardless of whether patients need it but because the providers can get paid for it. When organizations and committees try to set up guidelines or do research to see if current therapies are effective, special interests and politics kill the initiatives.

Hospitals focus on generating more business in departments which are profitable, like oncology, with newer buildings and the latest medical equipment so that they can afford to run emergency departments which continually lose money. Doctors and patients are enamored with the latest treatments and interventions which often are far more expensive, aren't better than existing therapies, and like the case of bone marrow transplant for metastatic breast cancer patients, are more lethal.

The pharmaceutical industry is intimately linked to doctor education and invariably influences which prescriptions are prescribed and market prescription medications as easily as consumer companies promote common household products. It is money not science that drives the healthcare system.

The author believes that solving the dysfunctional healthcare system requires that doctors and hospitals align themselves into integrated healthcare organizations like the Mayo Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, and the Veterans Health Administration. Unfortunately, however, because she makes such a compelling case of how each of the various providers and businesses each have a financial self interest to keep the current system going at the detriment of patient care, it is difficult to see how the transition will occur, if ever.

How Doctors Think
Fascinating read and written in the same spirit as Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. Dr. Groopman investigates how doctors make misjudgments and misdiagnoses because of their failures to understand and acknowledge cognitive limitations and errors in thought that affect all of us and are unbeknownst to us. He feels that if doctors take a step back, are introspective and insightful about these deficiencies and take appropriate steps to minimize these problems, we can be better clinicians. The doctors he profiles are truly inspirational, remarkable, and masters in their fields, not only because of their medical knowledge, but because of their recognition of what it takes to be superb people and clinicians.

If there is an area of disagreement, then it is the fact that Dr. Jerome Groopman suggests that the pressures of managed care and inadequate time are the cause of many of these cognitive errors. Yet, he never actually proved this in the book. He never showed that doctors were more likely to make the correct diagnoses in an era with fewer time constraints. In fact, he laments that doctors in training, where he teaches at Harvard, don't know how to think and then realized that he hadn't be trained how to think either over thirty years earlier (and hence the reason for his investigation and this book). He claims that quality of medical care shouldn't be simply defined as whether or not a patient with diabetes has his blood sugar checked routinely, yet Dr. Groopman also doesn't acknowledge that the major reason the United States ranks last in the world in keeping people healthy is because the quality of care delivered never was measured as carefully as it is today. Research shows that 80,000 Americans die prematurely (twice the number of breast cancer deaths) simply because the right preventive care wasn't delivered. Had the nation adopted those health insurance plans, hospitals, and doctors, who performed at the top 10 percent of providing this care, these individuals would be alive today. How do they do so well? It is because of implementation of systems that promote excellence.

As a practicing primary care doctor I understand the concerns of my colleagues of showing and proving that they are doing what they say. But we all know if you don't measure something and then re-evaluate it, how do you know if you are doing better? If anything, Dr. Groopman seems to suggest that medical care would be better if doctors didn't have to prove that they performed these metrics to the level of what the evidence shows to be effective even though other industries like financial services, manufacturing, and the airline industry do so rigorously to maintain their high levels of reliability, consistency, and safety.

Although he encourages patients be advocates for themselves, to ask questions, and how to slow a doctor down and think more clearly with certain comments, from his own examples it is clear that it isn't easy to do and frankly somewhat intimidating.

If there is a lesson to be learned, then it is that as doctors we need to understand that our thought processes can be clouded by emotions and can be limited simply because we too are human. To overcome this problem, which affects all of us, we need to be deliberately thoughtful and systematically introspective when caring for patients. As a practicing primary care doctor, I believe that we, not the patients, bear this responsibility and that I hope doctors in training are being taught this routinely in this country and that others welcome the opportunity to do better. While it should be a required reading assignment for medical students, interns, residents, and practicing physicians, better thinking doctors alone aren't going to improve healthcare quality in the United States.  Dr. Groopman's subtle suggestions that they might are simply his error in thinking and his inability to remain open-minded.  The world he trained in is far different than the world his trainees are about to enter.


Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
A fascinating and quick read.   In each section there are plenty of inspiring stores about doctors making a difference. Dr. Atul Gawande, a general surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital and staff writer for the New Yorker has keen observation and insight to make single stories demonstrate not only the failings of our healthcare system but also the solutions to them because of individuals asking questions on how to do better. Ultimately, one of the questions he asks is how can doctors and hospitals be positive deviants? How does one become a positive deviant or an outlier that pushes beyond convention and advances patient care to new levels?

He gives examples of how over four million children need to be vaccinated in Northern/Southern India in three days to prevent a large polio outbreak. An immunization rate of less than 90 percent would be considered a failure.

Dr. Gawande talked about the evolution of obstetrics. After a damaging report in 1933, the specialty consequently committed itself to standardizing childbirth ensuring that with the new medical knowledge that it was applied consistently and routinely throughout the country. As a result maternal death in childbirth fell 90 percent from one in 150 in the 1930s to one in 2000 by 1950s. With continued innovations and the commitment to do better, the chance of a woman dying in childbirth is less than one in 10,000 today.

There are plenty of amazing examples that you don't have to be a doctor to relate on how truly inspirational these individuals are in times when the stakes could not be higher - life or death.

Until our healthcare system improves to its full potential as Dr. Gawande challenges us to do, unfortunately will always remain benefiting those who are insiders and harming those who are not. The real question is which one are you?  This failing is part of the reason for the rise of the empowered patient movement.


The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care
The decade worth of research spent understanding, studying, and ultimately offering solutions to make the health care system more accessible, higher quality, and affordable is clear. Unlike other books, the authors avoid the traps the plague most other solutions by taking a completely different perspective by looking at other industries where products and services offered were "so complicated and expensive that only people with a lot of money can afford them, and only people with a lot of expertise can provide or use them." Yet convincingly through plenty of examples, it shows how telephones, computers, and airline travel moved from only accessible to those with the resources to become available and affordable to all.

The book tackles every aspect of health care and asks how will those in health care be disrupted and subsequently surpassed by other providers which deliver care that is more convenient, higher quality, and lower cost.

What will hospitals need to do as increasingly more surgical procedures are performed in high volume specialty hospitals?

How will doctor practices sustain themselves as new diagnostic tools and research makes the identification and treatment of problems more precise that nurse practitioners with clear protocols can deliver care previously required by physicians?

What mechanisms exist to streamline and integrate the various players of health care (doctors, hospitals, purchasers, insurers) so that all are focused on the benefit of wellness and outcomes of patient care rather than maximizing each of their own financials? (Hint: large employers will integrate health care and others will only purchase care delivered by integrated healthcare delivery systems).

What should medical schools do to prepare the next generation of doctors as current training is steeped in tradition, relevant a century ago, but woefully inadequate for the future?

How should pharmaceutical, medical device manufacturers, and diagnostic equipment makers position themselves for the inevitable changes that will affect them the same way previous leaders in other industries were overtaken by competitors and disruption?

How must the reimbursement system and regulators adapt to foster the innovation to make these changes occur?

If there is anything close to a crystal ball on what health care delivery will look like in the United States that will be increasingly affordable, higher quality, and accessible to all, this is it. The authors, respected Harvard Business School (HBS) professor, a doctor who also was the Director of Health Care Delivery Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School, and another doctor and graduate of the MBA program at HBS have convincingly demonstrated the likely path as well as indicated why a single payer nationalized system will stifle the innovation needed to improve our health care system. Those who wish to succeed in the new world of health care as predicted by this comprehensive and thoughtful analysis would be wise to consider this book.

Physician Autonomy, Professionalism, and Protocols – Mutually Exclusive?

Doctors are professionals.  But are doctors cowboys or pit crews?  Recently, physician writer, Dr. Atul Gawande, spoke about the challenges for the next generation of doctors in his commencement speech titled, Cowboys and Pit Crews, at Harvard Medical School.  Gawande notes that advancement of knowledge in American medicine has resulted in an amazing ability to provide care that was impossible a century ago.  Yet, something else also occurred in the process.

“[Medicine’s complexity] has exceeded our individual capabilities as doctors…
The core structure of medicine—how health care is organized and practiced—emerged in an era when doctors could hold all the key information patients needed in their heads and manage everything required themselves. One needed only an ethic of hard work, a prescription pad, a secretary, and a hospital willing to serve as one’s workshop, loaning a bed and nurses for a patient’s convalescence, maybe an operating room with a few basic tools. We were craftsmen. We could set the fracture, spin the blood, plate the cultures, administer the antiserum. The nature of the knowledge lent itself to prizing autonomy, independence, and self-sufficiency among our highest values, and to designing medicine accordingly. But you can’t hold all the information in your head any longer, and you can’t master all the skills. No one person can work up a patient’s back pain, run the immunoassay, do the physical therapy, protocol the MRI, and direct the treatment of the unexpected cancer found growing in the spine. I don’t even know what it means to “protocol” the MRI.”

Despite all of the advancements in medicine, the outcomes and consistency in treatment and care are not as good as they could be.  Doctors are not doing basic things.  The fact that Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto, spoke at one of the finest medical schools in the country indicates how much more the profession needs to go. 

“We don’t have to look far for evidence. Two million patients pick up infections in American hospitals, most because someone didn’t follow basic antiseptic precautions. Forty per cent of coronary-disease patients and sixty per cent of asthma patients receive incomplete or inappropriate care. And half of major surgical complications are avoidable with existing knowledge. It’s like no one’s in charge—because no one is. The public’s experience is that we have amazing clinicians and technologies but little consistent sense that they come together to provide an actual system of care, from start to finish, for people. We train, hire, and pay doctors to be cowboys. But it’s pit crews people need.”

So what is the issue?

Doctors usually bristle when facts of failure are mentioned.  When solutions are offered, a variety of reasons of why they won’t work often occur.  Doctors deal with patients and illness.  Medicine is different from other industries like aviation or auto manufacturing in their experience with providing a highly consistent and reliable service or product.  In many ways, this is true.  Patients are unique in their genetic makeups, personalities, backgrounds, and experiences.  Yet, the understanding of many illnesses has evolved to the point that doctors understand how to prevent, screen for, and treat these maladies which often afflict patients in similar ways.  When understood at this level of detail, this knowledge can be codified into protocols and workflows.  As research studies demonstrate what works and what does not, these can be refined further.  Analysis of medical errors borrow the same processes and tools from other organizations dealing with complex systems to determine underlying problems and more importantly solutions to avoid similar outcomes in the future.

The creation of standardized workflows, checklists, and protocols causes doctors to bristle even more.  As Gawande notes, the training of doctors today is essentially unchanged from generations ago which valued physician autonomy.  When asked to follow protocols, doctors often feel this freedom to practice medicine is threatened.  A natural tension exists between physician autonomy and adherence to protocols.  Many will argue that the two are mutually exclusive.  Both, in fact, can co-exist only if we look at the problem through a different lens.  It is about the difference between what Professor Clay Christensen, Harvard Business School professor, and author of the Innovator’s Prescription, calls intuitive medicine and precision medicine. 

It is also about professionalism.  Are doctors professionals or cowboys or pit crews? 

What Professor Christensen refers to as intuitive medicine is essentially how the public and doctors view themselves.  As a result of the medical training, history, and tradition, doctors are thinkers.  Patients present themselves with a set of symptoms or signs that they want doctors to solve.  Because the body only has a certain limited number of ways to manifest an illness (note that for a dermatologic disorder, the skin turns red and can blister due to a burn, drug rash, autoimmune disorder, or contact dermatitis), clinching the right diagnosis required doctors to ask questions, think, use pattern recognition, and experimentation.  Until the relatively rapid learnings over the past century, doctors did not understand the specific mechanisms, pathophysiology of diseases, or the appropriate treatments.   

An example of intuitive medicine was an illness that humbled American medicine just three decades ago.  It afflicted mainly young gay men.  Aside from the observations of a low T cell count and unusual opportunistic diseases affecting these patients, doctors were at a loss of what to do.  How did the illness occur?  How was it transmitted?  How as it treated?  The fear among the public was palpable.  During that time, doctors tried a variety of treatments that invariably failed though through some experimentation and observation, some patterns began to emerge.  The reasons for a few successes became better understood when HIV was discovered and doctors had a better understanding of AIDS.  As a result, the course of illness and then the development of therapies, treatment, and prevention programs occurred which now allow individuals with HIV to live productive lives.  

When scientific understanding of maladies becomes so clear that prevention, screening, and specific therapeutic options can be written down into steps, protocols, and workflows, Professor Christensen refers to this type of medicine as precision medicine.  Many medical problems, like diabetes, are in this category.

The pathophysiology of diabetes is known.  There are two types of diabetes, insulin dependent and non-insulin dependent diabetes.  The degree of blood sugar control can be determined with a simple blood test, HgbA1c.  If a patient has insulin dependent diabetes, the treatment must begin with insulin.  For non-insulin dependent diabetes, treatment can often start with weight loss, physical activity, and dietary changes.  Prescription medications, like metformin, and then later glipizide can be added in a stepwise approach based on a specific protocol should an individual patient’s blood sugar control require it.  The fact that the understanding of diabetes and development has occurred over the past few decades has benefited Professor Christensen greatly.  He has insulin dependent diabetes.  Had he been born a century ago, he would not have lived very long as insulin was not discovered until the early 1920s.

Yet, there are some areas in diabetes research which continue to evolve.  Intensive blood sugar and blood pressure control in patients with insulin dependent diabetes was found to decrease the risk of complications and death.  It was assumed and extrapolated that similar treatment would also benefit those with non-insulin dependent diabetes.  Recently studies have shown that older patients did not benefit and perhaps were harmed with this level of treatment.  As a result, the guidelines have changed.

Although the protocols and guidelines are good, they are not perfect.  They are only as good as the research available at that time.  They continue to be refined.  They are not static.  It is this element that opponents of using precision medicine shout out words like “cookbook medicine” which have significant negative connotation.  This simply denigrates the hard work and research that has allowed an illness to move from the realm of intuitive medicine to precision medicine.  The fact that these protocols are not perfect, should not be a reason not to use them. 

At the heart of being a professional and consummate physician is the knowledge and wisdom to understand when a patient’s illness or treatment of a condition fits a known workflow or protocol and when it does not.  The very best physicians follow procedures meticiously and thoughtfully whether placing a central line using the five critical steps as outlined by McArthur grant recipient and John Hopkins critical care specialist, Dr. Peter Pronovost, to eliminate risk of infection or taking seriously a surgical timeout to avoid wrong site surgeries.

Too often doctors will argue that blindly following protocols infringes on their autonomy.  That is true.  Blind adherence is a problem.  However, passively going through the motions is equally as disasterous.   Life saving treatment isn’t rendered.  Screening tests not offered.   Preventable medical errors still occur.  In November 2010, only six months before Gawande’s commencement speech, a wrong site surgery case was prominently profiled in the New England Journal of Medicine.  It occurred at one of the nation’s most prestigious hospitals, Massachusetts General Hospital.

In the end, it is the mindset of physicians which matter.  We aren’t cowboys.  We aren’t pit crews.  If analogies must be made, then we are like the pilots in flight crews who are professionals and despite the complexity of their roles provide ultrasafe travel.  Doctors are professionals.  It is what the public expects.  Using protocols, checklists, and standardized workflows are just as important as refining them to be even better.  Knowing when not to apply them, is just as vital as ensuring that those situations where they do apply that they are done - every patient every time.

Our patients deserve better.  We can and must do better.

What Dr. Oz Learned From His Cancer Scare - Honest and Unplugged. What Doctors Can Learn.

Dr. Mehmet Oz recently had a piece in Time titled "What I Learned from My Cancer Scare" in which he became the the more humbled Mr. Mehmet Oz.  As noted previously here, Dr. Oz last summer had a colonoscopy at age 50 and much to everyone's surprise had a precancerous colon polyp.  He was advised to follow-up again for a repeat test in 3 months.

As the Time magazine piece noted, he didn't return for 9 months despite repeated reminders from his doctor.

From this experience, he essentially stumbled upon what has been challenging American medicine and primary care.  How do we enable patients to do the right thing and get the screening tests done and treatments necessary to avoid premature death and maintain a high quality of life?  As a highly trained professional, Dr. Oz knows the risks and benefits of not doing a preventive screening test.  As a doctor, he knows all of the secret protocols and codespeak we use when calling patients or asking them to see us in the office for important matters.  As a doctor, he also understood the importance of a repeat colonoscopy to ensure no more colon growths.

Yet he didn't return for 9 months.  Why?

None of us want to deal with our mortality.  Having a screening test means there is a possibility that the test may be abnormal and now we must confront it face to face. Skipping the test means to be blissfully ignorant, even if it is the wrong thing to do.

Also, as Dr. Oz noted, many individuals, particularly those who are otherwise healthy with no family history, feel that many of these tests or interventions don't apply to them.  Trust me, I know.  As a practicing primary care doctor, do you know how hard it is to convince someone to get screened for colon cancer?  Get vaccinated for pertussis, influenza, or pneumonia?

Dr. Oz, however, did discover what will compel people to do the right thing.  It isn't about statistics.  It isn't about knowledge.  (And though he never discussed it, it certainly won't be consumer driven health care where the theory is that forcing people to have more financial "skin in the game" will enable the right behavior).  It's about getting to our emotions.

Most important, my colonoscopy wasn't entirely about me. It was about my wife and our children. It's about our someday grandchildren. It's about my childhood friends whose lives remain closely intertwined with mine. It's about my colleagues and patients at the hospital who teach me as I learn from them. I need to be there for all these people I know and care about. I need to show up in my own life. And you need to show up in yours. Sometimes that requires courage — the courage to undergo a colonoscopy or Pap smear or mammogram or chest X-ray. It's not easy, but it could save your life. And if it helps even a little, remember that I will be rooting for you.

Reminding our patients that their inaction isn't just affecting their own livelihood but their network of family and friends.  It's the reason why certain topics in the media, like the concerns about vaccine safety and autism, gain far more momentum than the scientifically researched and proven life saving interventions and treatments do.

They focus on the emotional aspect of us that make us uniquely human.

Until we, as doctors, employ those same tools, too many Americans will not learn from Dr. Oz's cancer scare or those from a variety of public figures.  The same problems will simply repeat themselves, just different people become spokespersons (note Katie Couric from a decade earlier regarding colon cancer screening).

Though highly unlikely Dr. Oz will ever read this article, one thing he must do is to highlight the need for a robust primary care workforce and inspire a generation of doctors in training to become the front-line of prevention.  Despite his work as a public figure, the intimate and personal conversations needed about preventive tests and treatments happen one on one at a primary care doctor's office.  And we certainly need a lot more of us to get the job done.