TV's 'House' Care Is Not Healthcare
Hi, everybody. This is John Marshall for Medscape on our video blog series, or as my children say, "VLOG." I wanted to talk a little bit today about our patients' expectations of healthcare. When I was growing up, healthcare and doctors were the Marcus Welbys of the world and M*A*S*H. Even out in a war zone, they were going to do everything they could for you with the resources that they had. I think that when our patients walk in the door, they have a very high expectation of us.
I was on service this weekend and was rounding. A patient in the hospital had a lot of demands for us that seemed out of the ordinary. The patient wanted us to call all of her physicians on a Saturday to make sure that they knew she was in the hospital. We got calls from her family late at night because the IV had run out for 1 hour. There was a very precise, very detailed set of expectations of what we could do as healthcare providers. Of course, it was above and beyond what we normally do day to day. It was almost boutique-level healthcare that we were being asked to provide in our hospital without any boutique-level payment.
What really struck me is the television series called House, based on Sherlock Holmes. You've got this brilliant guy heading a team of people who all do every procedure in the book. They go to people's houses and dig around in their basements. They stop everything for 1 patient and focus on him. What House never does -- at least I don't think I've ever seen it in a House episode -- is pause for health insurance checks or preauthorization. Does the test not get done or are there complications of the test? They are also disregarding HIPAA completely, of course, because they all talk about everything. All the constraints that we live under are not featured in an episode of House. No one is seeing what really goes on in healthcare.
Why that worries me is that we are now going to have changes in healthcare policy. We are all feeling this and our patients are beginning to feel it. In this morning's Washington Post, I was reading about Romney's plan for healthcare. Medicare is going to significantly cut services for the elderly. He is not saying that in his ad campaigns or in his advertisements. He is just saying that he is going to lower costs for everything, but he is not saying what the repercussions of that are going to be. Of course, they are all doing that.
We need to start helping to guide our patients through their expectations, what we are going to be able to do and what we cannot do going forward, and how healthcare is going to change in the United States over time. We need to manage these expectations for our patients. We as healthcare providers, hospital systems, pharmaceutical companies, national cancer institutes, and leaders need to have this discussion on a public level to say that we are going to try to improve outcomes, do it with less cost, and bring in innovative therapies and new techniques as quickly as we can, but balancing all of that against a patient expectation of immediate, concierge-level service. It's going to be a challenge as we move forward.
Managing patient expectations here in Washington, DC, as I am about to go round, I'm John Marshall for Medscape.
Hi, everybody. This is John Marshall for Medscape on our video blog series, or as my children say, "VLOG." I wanted to talk a little bit today about our patients' expectations of healthcare. When I was growing up, healthcare and doctors were the Marcus Welbys of the world and M*A*S*H. Even out in a war zone, they were going to do everything they could for you with the resources that they had. I think that when our patients walk in the door, they have a very high expectation of us.
I was on service this weekend and was rounding. A patient in the hospital had a lot of demands for us that seemed out of the ordinary. The patient wanted us to call all of her physicians on a Saturday to make sure that they knew she was in the hospital. We got calls from her family late at night because the IV had run out for 1 hour. There was a very precise, very detailed set of expectations of what we could do as healthcare providers. Of course, it was above and beyond what we normally do day to day. It was almost boutique-level healthcare that we were being asked to provide in our hospital without any boutique-level payment.
What really struck me is the television series called House, based on Sherlock Holmes. You've got this brilliant guy heading a team of people who all do every procedure in the book. They go to people's houses and dig around in their basements. They stop everything for 1 patient and focus on him. What House never does -- at least I don't think I've ever seen it in a House episode -- is pause for health insurance checks or preauthorization. Does the test not get done or are there complications of the test? They are also disregarding HIPAA completely, of course, because they all talk about everything. All the constraints that we live under are not featured in an episode of House. No one is seeing what really goes on in healthcare.
Why that worries me is that we are now going to have changes in healthcare policy. We are all feeling this and our patients are beginning to feel it. In this morning's Washington Post, I was reading about Romney's plan for healthcare. Medicare is going to significantly cut services for the elderly. He is not saying that in his ad campaigns or in his advertisements. He is just saying that he is going to lower costs for everything, but he is not saying what the repercussions of that are going to be. Of course, they are all doing that.
We need to start helping to guide our patients through their expectations, what we are going to be able to do and what we cannot do going forward, and how healthcare is going to change in the United States over time. We need to manage these expectations for our patients. We as healthcare providers, hospital systems, pharmaceutical companies, national cancer institutes, and leaders need to have this discussion on a public level to say that we are going to try to improve outcomes, do it with less cost, and bring in innovative therapies and new techniques as quickly as we can, but balancing all of that against a patient expectation of immediate, concierge-level service. It's going to be a challenge as we move forward.
Managing patient expectations here in Washington, DC, as I am about to go round, I'm John Marshall for Medscape.