The Golden Moment

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The Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative met this fall and a lot of the big wigs in medicine tried to find some answers on how to fix this mess THEY got us into.   My favorite was from Marie Brown, M.D., senior physician adviser for the AMA’s professional satisfaction and practice sustainability group.  Anyone know or care what that group does?  Thought so. Well, Dr. Brown has this novel thought that doctors need to spend “more quality time with the patient and delegating more to the medical team will allow physicians to return to the “golden moment”.

Here are some interesting points about that.  She is now associating the term quality with time by using the phrases “quality time” and “golden moment”. Hmmm, could it be that I was right that in order to fix this crap we need to allow doctors to have time with patients?

There is more from Dr. Brown:

She described physicians entering the exam room, making direct eye contact, shaking the patient’s hand and saying they care. They ask about the patient’s health and listen, neither interrupting nor looking at a computer screen.

“We have to change what we do,” Brown said. “We want that. The patients want that. But with the computer, the regulations and all the interpretations required by institutions, we’ve added another 200 clicks on the computer.”

Hmmm, so what she is saying is that we need to see less patients, spend more time with them and get bureaucracy out of healthcare?  All we need to do is rewind the clock.  Or support Direct Primary Care.