Physicians Using Smartphones Can Help Decrease Deaths
Atul Gawande never thought he would write a book about checklists. But it turns out, checklists save lives.
Gawande, a surgeon at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a staff writer for The New Yorker was at Harvard University on Wednesday to discuss his new book “The Checklist Manifesto.”
Like Baer, Gawande uses stories to transmit important information on health policy. While an undergraduate at Stanford University, Gawande took a creative writing course because a girl he liked (Kathleen Hobson, now his wife) was taking it. He got a C because he had “nothing to say.” It wasn’t until he began his surgical training that Gawande had something he wanted to write about. He ended up writing two successful books on surgery: “Complications” and “Better.”
He is now “Dr. Checklist,” because while working for the World Health Organization (WHO), Gawande demonstrated that checklists reduce surgical complications and death by double-digit percentage points in hospitals around the world.
Despite his amazing findings, surgeons are resistant to using checklists. Gawande suspects that is because they go against what people believe it means to be an expert—experts are supposed to know everything, not rely on a piece of paper.
At the same time 93.5 per cent of surgeons said they would like a checklist to be used if they were having surgery.
Hopefully, Gawande’s storytelling will eventually reach enough people for his research to be implemented in every surgery, not just surgeries performed on surgeons.
Physicians Using Smartphones Can Help Decrease Deaths
A Manhattan Research report predicts that in the next two years, 81 percent of U.S. physicians will be using smartphones*. Currently penetration is 64 percent. Manhattan believes that “the Internet will become physicians’ primary professional resource,” as physicians become more proficient with Smartphone technologies.
What does this mean to consumers? Hopefully this will increase the quality and efficiency of our care. When our physician walks in, he or she can enter our symptoms to search for a possible diagnosis, verify that our medications all coordinate correctly and ask other specialist’s direct questions.
The stereotype that doctors have bad handwriting is a point of comedy in the US. But it’s not as comical when one realizes that more than 7,000 Americans die annually due to sloppy handwritten prescriptions**. So all other benefits aside, digitally submitted prescriptions would equal 7,000 fewer deaths. And that’s not taking in to account the lives saved from having prescription interactions verified by a digital database.
With the technology now showing up in physicians’ hands we already see software and apps on the market specific to healthcare. But as adoption increases no doubt we will begin to see examples of the patient-doctor interaction model transformed.
Gawande, a surgeon at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a staff writer for The New Yorker was at Harvard University on Wednesday to discuss his new book “The Checklist Manifesto.”
Like Baer, Gawande uses stories to transmit important information on health policy. While an undergraduate at Stanford University, Gawande took a creative writing course because a girl he liked (Kathleen Hobson, now his wife) was taking it. He got a C because he had “nothing to say.” It wasn’t until he began his surgical training that Gawande had something he wanted to write about. He ended up writing two successful books on surgery: “Complications” and “Better.”
He is now “Dr. Checklist,” because while working for the World Health Organization (WHO), Gawande demonstrated that checklists reduce surgical complications and death by double-digit percentage points in hospitals around the world.
Despite his amazing findings, surgeons are resistant to using checklists. Gawande suspects that is because they go against what people believe it means to be an expert—experts are supposed to know everything, not rely on a piece of paper.
At the same time 93.5 per cent of surgeons said they would like a checklist to be used if they were having surgery.
Hopefully, Gawande’s storytelling will eventually reach enough people for his research to be implemented in every surgery, not just surgeries performed on surgeons.
Physicians Using Smartphones Can Help Decrease Deaths
A Manhattan Research report predicts that in the next two years, 81 percent of U.S. physicians will be using smartphones*. Currently penetration is 64 percent. Manhattan believes that “the Internet will become physicians’ primary professional resource,” as physicians become more proficient with Smartphone technologies.
What does this mean to consumers? Hopefully this will increase the quality and efficiency of our care. When our physician walks in, he or she can enter our symptoms to search for a possible diagnosis, verify that our medications all coordinate correctly and ask other specialist’s direct questions.
The stereotype that doctors have bad handwriting is a point of comedy in the US. But it’s not as comical when one realizes that more than 7,000 Americans die annually due to sloppy handwritten prescriptions**. So all other benefits aside, digitally submitted prescriptions would equal 7,000 fewer deaths. And that’s not taking in to account the lives saved from having prescription interactions verified by a digital database.
With the technology now showing up in physicians’ hands we already see software and apps on the market specific to healthcare. But as adoption increases no doubt we will begin to see examples of the patient-doctor interaction model transformed.
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