If health care taught Health Care 101, what would it teach?
Ed Cotton at influx writes of a coffee shop (Intelligentsia Coffee) that has set-up a “lab” in NYC to teach people about coffee. He then asks a stop-you-in-your-tracks question:
If your brand was to educate people, what would it teach them?
Oh gosh, my mind is flowing with possibilities. An educated patient would be an informed patient. An informed patient would make informed decisions. Could you imagine such a health care world?
Ten topics (how many do you think there could be? 1000s?) that come to mind in a morning brainstorm:
- How to make health care decisions as a patient (it would be a year long course)
- What health care costs and why
- How health insurance works (or doesn’t…)
- How health care is paid for (all dollars flow from households…)
- How doctors are paid
- How hospitals are paid
- The complicated (and at times contradictory) relationships of involved stakeholders
- The art of medicine
- New approaches to delivering medicine
- How health care is delivered in the rest of the world
This is a great post. One of the things I enjoy most about being a physician is the opportunity to teach. And I’ve often thought that we could find better ways to educate patients in a more relaxed way, perhaps before they are faced head on with some disaster. It’s interesting that the word doctor actually comes from the Latin “docere” meaning “to teach.” (yes I took Latin in high school). The other day I saw a patient for a second opinion. My patient was concerned about his condition and feared that he had something wrong that only surgery could fix. By calmly educating him about the nature of the condition I was able to reassure him that, no he did not need surgery. And yes, everything would be OK without it. I’m sure the previous doctor had told him the same thing. But for some reason it didn’t come across in the same way. As I was leaving the room I heard the patient tell his wife, “boy, I feel a lot better now.”
That was the highlight of my day. Now I am a surgeon and love to operate. And frankly in most cases the system pays surgeons more to operate than to talk. But that’s not what my patient needed. From my perspective, the key to the interaction was education; explaining to him what he had, why it happened, will it do more damage if we “do nothing”, what to expect, what does it all mean? And translating those things from hard science to real life. After all, a pain free shoulder isn’t just a pain free shoulder to my patients. It’s the ability to reach, comb their hair, sleep comfortably at night or pick up their kids. I would argue that some of the best doctors are the best (patient) educators.
Education takes time, a human relationship and context. That will never change, nor will the patient’s need for it.
