Susannah Fox sheds light on something so many people take for granted in her recent article for Medium.com. Sharing.
Time is of the Essence.
Fox shares a story of a patient with a very rare condition who took it upon herself to track her medications’ interactions. It’s because of this she was able to refuse a certain prescribed medications that could have been lethal to her. When met with resistance from the prescribing doctor, she had to defend herself against the argument that, “for 20 years he has been telling all his patients to take it and no one else has ever complained.”
The particularly frightening portion of this story is that the physician prescribed without checking how the medications would interact with each other. Equally disturbing is that he then challenged the patient, attempting to coerce her into submission.
Maybe he had a reason for doing what he did. Maybe he didn’t have the time to do his research. Maybe he was in a rush to get to his next patient. Who knows.
But that sigh of relief you just heard? That came from all the Direct Primary Care physicians out there who don’t have to worry about such things as rushing from one patient to the next, or not having time to do research. Because the DPC model is not reliant upon meeting quotas, making a certain amount of money, or owing anything to big pharma.
DPC is patient-centric, short and sweet. DPC physicians keep a mere 500 or so patients on their roster so as to make time (real time) for each of them. If the doc in the story above had that kind of time, he might have been able to do that research. He might have caught the lethal prescription combination. He might have been able to do what he went to school for in the first place: practice medicine.
Time is needed to provide patients quality healthcare. DPC docs have it.
They Teach Sharing in Pre-School.
There’s something else about Fox’s article that jumps out at us, though, and that’s the part about sharing information. Share the information you gather with an online community, with your medical staff, with others in your situation. Share so everyone can gain from what you know. It’s a basic fundamental taught from an early age, and we agree there’s no reason to abandon it now.
The Atlas.md EMR was developed by Direct Primary Care docs for direct primary care docs. From one team working to better the state of healthcare to other teams around the country doing the very same thing, trust us when we say we know how important it is to share.
That’s why we’ve integrated several ways to share information with others in your DPC clinic right from the app. Things like being able to use Dropbox to quickly and easily share lab results, scans, etc. with everyone. Things like editing a note in a patient’s chart and being able to see who it was edited by, what was edited and even why it was edited.
In the sharing spirit yet?
If you’re imagining a group of docs researching diagnoses in their downtime, documenting what they discovered, and then chatting about it while waiting for their next patient… you’re exactly right.
Read more about how sharing is the future of healthcare over here. >