Do You Care?
THIS MONTH’S COVER STORY (PAGE 12)
delves into what it takes to create an NCQA-
approved medical home, and a lot of the hard
builds center around creating an information
technology hub to shepherd patients and in-
formation across a multitude
of care settings.
There’s a lot of that going
on right now in the provider
sector, thanks to new finan-
cial incentives and clinical
quality improvement pres-
sures. While that’s undoubt-
edly a good thing, it’s danger-
ous to think of technology as
a complete answer to what ails the industry.
The true aim of the all this technology adop-
tion should be to provide an environment
where “caregivers” truly are just that.
Sal Volpe, M.D., gets it. In the cover story,
he talks about how he idolized TV’s Mar-
cus Welby, and how that archetype inspired
him to become a physician. He believes that
medical homes can help the industry re-in-
ject that humanity into the doctor’s office:
“If you live in a home, everyone cares about
everyone else. Everyone in the home pitches
in to make sure everyone succeeds. You mi-
grate that idea to the physician office. So the
front desk isn’t brusque with people and the
staff asks patients about their families, about
the daughter who just went to college.”
Does that really matter in a world increas-
ingly driven by mouse-clicks?
Doctors of yesteryear were renowned
for their bedside manner, and many care-
givers bemoan how medicine has moved
away from allowing that level of personal
interaction with patients. However ... Mar-
cus Welby was kind, and caring, and wise,
but we know now that medical care back in
the day was rife with errors, including errors
of omission. And the practice of medicine
has become infinitely more
complex due to the bazaar
of drugs available and more
advanced machines. Also far
more complex is the entire
reimbursement cycle.
Technology is a means
to an end—the end being a
point where caregivers can
bring their medical training
and innate compassion fully to bear. What’s
encouraging is that many physicians are
starting to believe I.T. can enable them to
have it both ways—giving them an opportu-
nity to spend more time with patients, and
giving them the data to make that time ex-
tremely productive.
Right now, the medical profession is un-
dergoing a painful transition, made more
acute by technologies and medical science
that still have a ways to go before they’re
truly mature.
But the industry is close to a point when
caregivers can start thinking about what can
be gained from technology coupled with
new/old concepts like medical homes, not
what has been lost.
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