healthcare

Care Enough To Care

/ crcaldwell / Leave a comment

Screen Shot 2018-03-12 at 4.57.03 PM“I can teach you medicine, but I cannot teach you to care” was a frequent saying from a mentor during my residency training.  Empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings of another, is perhaps the most critical component in a doctor.  It is also one that is sometimes missing today in many healthcare workers.   I would venture that a lack of empathy is not just less in healthcare, but in our society in general.  Do you care enough to care?

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?

– Henry David Thoreau

Empathy is not just a good thing in abstraction but it translates to better business and better patient outcomes.  In a study of orthopedic patients, 65% of patient satisfaction was attributed to empathy,  the largest factor found in the study.  Satisfaction was not significantly affected by wait time for an appointment, wait time in the office, time with the surgeon, resident/fellow involvement, whether or not patients were seeking a second opinion, health literacy, or treatment choice.  Empathy was far more important.  The study showed that physician empathy was the best opportunity to improve the patient experience.  Research has shown empathy and compassion to be associated with better adherence to medications, decreased malpractice cases, fewer mistakes, in addition to increased patient satisfaction.  This translates to better overall patient outcomes, fewer hospital readmissions and an improved bottom line for hospitals.

This video is from the Cleveland Clinic from a few years ago but it makes a very important point.  If you could stand in someone else’s shoes; hear what they hear; see what they see; feel what they feel; Would you treat them differently?

56% of physicians said they lacked the time to be empathic, and 29% reported burn-out as the primary reason for their difficulty in being empathic.  One criticism of telemedicine is the lack of an in-person personal connection to the patient.  But empathy is a skill that can be utilized even through a remote connection.  Telemedicine allows the provider to time-shift a patient encounter to a time and setting of their choosing.  It changes their practice in a way that the provider has more time to show that they care.

Check out the new Housecall version and sign up today!   It is available on desktop computer, iOS, and Android platforms  Ask us about how we can help your bottom line while delivering state of the art healthcare for your patients.

Responsibility

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Healthcare Security“Do the right thing even when no one is watching.”  That was always one of my father’s axioms.  It is a philosophy of being responsible and accountable to your own personal standard and having a standard that is independent of the setting.  “The right thing” is something you know in your heart.

In business, “the right thing” is sometimes confused with “the right thing for our business” or “the right thing for our profits”.  It is easy to cut the corner in business to make things more profitable.  It is easy to focus on a short-term gain more than a long-term relationship.  It becomes easy in business to not hold your company’s standard up to your own.  It’s “just business” for many companies…

In telemedicine, we have a responsibility to get certain things exactly right every time.  Security is critical! We are entrusted with safeguarding your personal information and your electronic health data.  It is a responsibility that is not only vital to our company but a sacred responsibility to our customers.  We have our servers hosted on the most secure cloud servers in the world at Armor (http://www.armor.com). This is a company that goes the extra mile to provide top-notch security for your data.  They are responsible for the infrastructure of our servers, while we are responsible for the data put into those servers.  Our team at iHeartDoc is up to date on the latest threats and phishing/social engineering schemes that are a daily threat to data security.  Your electronic protected health information (ePHI) is safe in our HIPAA compliant, HITRUST certified servers.  Our security team undergoes regular audits and remediation analysis to ensure the most secure environment possible for your data.  Your data security is our responsibility.

As a physician, I often tell patients that the most important aspect of a doctor-patient relationship is trust.  If you can’t trust your doctor, you need to find another doctor.  The same goes with any company providing telemedicine or keeping your health data.  If you can’t trust that company to “do the right thing even when no one is watching”, you need to find another company you can trust.

How Housecall Began…

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Housecall Beginning

Housecall started the summer that my two daughters were away at the Kansas City Ballet Intensive.  Ballet Feet  It was an idea that a doctor-dad had, as he viewed his two daughter’s ailing feet from 400 miles away.  Ballerinas, for all their grace and precision, have notoriously terrible feet.  They stuff them into pointe shoes and then try to balance on their toes for several hours a day.  Young ballerinas learn to deal with the myriad ailments that come with dancing for hours at a time.  That summer intensive was my two daughter’s first experience in dancing at a pre-professional level.  Their feet were not used to the punishing schedule.  So, they turned to their dad, a Cardiologist.  I was giving them advice about foot care (not exactly my specialty) after viewing the various bumps, bruises, blisters, and sores that many hours of ballet had wrought.  I found that FaceTime actually worked pretty darn well to get an up close, high definition view of a blistered toe or a swollen foot.  A mobile phone could easily share a detailed view of what hurt.  I thought about all the times I had a patient who had called in and gone into a detailed description of some bruise or swollen area.  The call invariably resulted in telling them to “just come in and let me look at it.” 

I researched FaceTime and Skype and discovered that neither were secure enough for a medical use.  They could fairly easily be hacked.  I looked around at the video conferencing apps and products that had been around for a decade or more to connect businesses remotely to their home office.  I found that they too were not secure enough for medical use and that most companies that had tried to create a telemedicine product out of their video conferencing app had found that a medical appointment was a little different than a discussion of the latest product release.  Several large communication companies had tried and failed at finding the right way to do telemedicine.  I began to think that this was an idea whose time had come and I was in a unique position to do something different. 

I also had spent years looking at lists of heart rates and blood pressures from patients.  They came into my office with legal pads filled with their home readings over days, weeks and sometimes months.  Many patients with hypertension have fairly good BP readings at home but very high readings in our offices.  The dreaded “white coat hypertension” was reliant on accurate patient-derived data from home, but dismissed data derived by a trained medical professional in the office.  I had noticed the trend of patient health tracking via Jawbone’s Up band, Fitbit, and the at the time soon to come Apple Watch.  I saw that trend as transformative.  The patient would collect their own health data and be able to share it with whomever they wanted.  I wanted to give the patient the ability to be the collector (and owner) of their own health data but to put that data in a format that would make sense for a doctor reviewing it in a telemedicine conference.  Adding that data information to a remote telemedicine visit would allow a doctor to actually treat a patient just like they did in the office.  That formative idea was Housecall.