Posts Tagged ‘Electronic Health Record’
Patient centric healthcare – does that mean more doctors?
I attended a Parkinsons Disease support conference recently and one of the presenters, a doctor, had a lot in his presentation about the way forward was a patient centric approach – especially since Parkinsons means that you need care from multiple disciplines. I asked him what patients’ organisations could do to make the system more patients centric and his answer was that we need more doctors. To me, that didn’t sound more patient centric. In fairness to healthcare practitioners who are usually continuously trying to improve efficiencies and get more out of the day, it is natural for them to see the solution as “more doctors”. But there is a shortage of doctors already and in the next two decades as emerging countries such as India and China beef up their middle classes, the western world will face an even bigger shortage. I replied that because of the health cuts here in Ireland and the shortage of doctors worldwide, it didn’t look like we were going to get more doctors. His solution was that we should agitate for more doctors. Wouldn’t it be much better for patients’ organisations to just get out there and form a community and arm themselves with information and start to help themselves more rather than relying on a cavalry of doctors appearing over the hill at the last minute? Patients who live with chronic diseases know a lot about their disease and the combined knowledge of a crowd of patients would be far greater than what one person can know. So a community where people share information is invaluable not only to others with the same condition, but also to the medical professionals who care for them. This is what Health 2.0 is all about.
