Another ROCC Star, Dr. Kevin Lobdell

Aneil and Kevin are in Toledo, Ohio today, giving a talk entitled “Quality Improvement and Transformational Change:  The Role of the Trusted Leader” to physicians, staff, and health care managers at St. Vincent Mercy Medical Center.
Kevin Lobdell, M.D. is Director of the Adult and Pediatric CV Critical Care, and is Associate Director of the Cardiothoracic [...]

Wrong Incentives Undermine Medical Diagnoses

In medicine, proper diagnosis is essential to effective treatment and healing, so I was disturbed (but not surprised) to see yet another example of how incentives in the U.S. health care system undermine proper diagnosis. Today’s example comes from the Wall Street Journal:

Many in health-policy circles have focused on how the current health-care payment [...]

Talk Turkey with Your Surgeon So You Don’t End Up as Hamburger

Today’s Wall Street Journal column, The Informed Patient by Laura Landro, was a great reminder of the critical importance of patients working closely with their surgeons and physicians in order to get the proper treatments and healing:

To help patients be more pro-active, health-care groups, hospitals and medical specialty societies are offering new resources, including Web [...]

Use Checklists to Increase Your Reliability

A great article in a recent issue of The New Yorker, brought to my attention by good friend Dr. Kevin Lobdell, points out the critical importance of checklists in achieving reliability in highly complex task environments:
In 2001, though, a critical-care specialist at Johns Hopkins Hospital named Peter Pronovost decided to give it a try. [...]

Coughs Due to Colds: Avoid Robitussin, Mucinex, and Guaifenesin!

Update 11/19/07:
I caught some kind of chest cold over the weekend, and it exacerbated my asthma, so I called my doctor’s office this morning.  The triage nurse recommended I try some Mucinex, which I then told her was contraindicated in patients with chronic cough due to asthma.  I don’t have chronic cough, but I do [...]

Chapel Hill Pediatrics Develops Electronic Records for Patients

Yes, all four Mishras are all fighting the latest bug that has most likely come from one of the several hundred students our kids interact with at Durham Academy, or from the students where we teach, Meredith College or Wake Forest University. In any case, when I took Maggie in to see the doctor [...]

Want Kids? We Know Someone Who Can Help

It took Karen a year to get pregnant with each of our children, and the first time she did try some fertility drug, Clomid for six months (she got pregnant the month after she decided to stop taking it). Since then, my best friend from college, John Gordon, has become an infertility specialist. [...]

Keep Your Eye on This: Even More Problems with Contact Lens Solutions

Update 5/29/07
According to the Wall Street Journal today:

Recent outbreaks of serious eye infections among contact lens users may be tied to a federal decision to reduce the use of chlorine and other disinfecting chemicals in public water supplies, according to a team of Chicago doctors who discovered the latest eye problems.
Last Friday, [...]

Want More Professional Prestige? Go Save Some Lives!

According to the latest Harris Interactive poll, published in today’s Wall Street Journal, firefighters, physicians, scientists and nurses are accorded the highest prestige by the public.  In contrast, people hold business executives in very little regard:

When read a list of different occupations, 63% of respondents to the telephone poll said they feel firefighters have “very [...]

Communication Impacts Physician Trust, too

Communication is important in building trust for all types of relationships, including doctor-patient relationships, as reported in an article by UPI.
The study, published in Arthritis Care & Research, found physicians' patient-centered communication was the only variable that was significantly associated with patients' willingness to disclose information.
So, effective communication impacts both our willingness to trust our [...]