Imagine you’ve been experiencing some physical symptoms that don’t seem normal to you. At first you ignored them, but when they didn’t go away, you logged on to your favorite browser and plugged in a few terms. A long list of pages comes up, and you start clicking away to try to figure out what …
The calls come pretty routinely. “My mom has long-term care insurance and it’s time for her to have help. I’ve called five agencies, and they all tell me they don’t have any available caregivers now. We promised her she could stay at home, and she bought insurance to make sure of that. Now we can’t …
With the advent of really good inventory management, we’ve been trained to wait to buy things until when we need them – just in time. However when inventory is managed so tightly, it’s a bit of a dance when demand picks up. (Think toilet paper). As a consequence many of us have begun to think …
I remember vividly the first time I used Skype in my work life to communicate with a colleague at a distance. While it was kinda cool to be able to see him, the video was jerky with weird delays, and I felt like I had to keep repeating myself, or asking him to, as the …
Next Best Thing to Being There…or is it? (Some musings on telemedicine) Read More »
This was the title of a Time magazine piece by Haley Edwards a few years back that included a profile of a case in our practice. The article came to mind through a recent personal experience I wanted to share. Seven weeks ago I sustained a catastrophic plumbing accident in my home, a condo I …
(Hint: It’s not personal.) There is no question that the internet has been the most important tool to ever empower patients with knowledge and information to make informed choices about their health and healthcare. Some have even given it a nickname of sorts, “Doctor Google.” It’s the first place many of us go when we …
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly About Dr. Google Read More »
I may be one of the few people on the planet who invested my second language studies in Latin. And yes, it probably would have been more practical to study a language people actually speak! While having a working knowledge of Latin has been helpful for crossword puzzles, at other times my intellectual curiosity simply …
Hospital Discharge: Could it be a bit more hospitable? Read More »
You might remember a children’s game from long ago called “Telephone:” Someone thought of a message and whispered it to the person next to them, who whispered it to the person next to them and so on. The last person would repeat what they heard out loud and it was always met with giggles and …
Emergency. Dictionary.com defines it this way: “a sudden, urgent, usually unexpected occurrence or occasion requiring immediate action. “ In my healthcare experience lifetime, perhaps nothing has changed more than the role of the hospital emergency room. In my youth the hospital had two roles: caring for very ill or post-surgery patients needing nursing care until …
Healthcare Directives and Planning The call came late on a Thursday. The husband of a long married couple had suffered a stroke 2 weeks earlier. He had lost the ability to swallow and the doctor at the hospital had urged surgery to place a feeding tube directly to his stomach before transferring him to a …