Recently I was teaching in a Sutter Health leadership development program when the nice Sacramento State professor who organizes the program fainted while asking me a question. With lots of caring, compassionate doctors in the room, soon an ambulance was on its way so he could be checked out. Fortunately, nothing serious, but he needed to go to a hospital for evaluation. And then, the “discussion:” what insurance did he have, which hospitals accepted which insurance, could he use a Sutter facility—in short, precisely the health-irrelevant discussion that health systems and their clients must engage in everyday given our current screwed up system.
When my wife had ear trouble a few years ago in Spain, she saw two different doctors in two different facilities, including an internationally-famous ear specialist. Believe it or not, the conversations were about—her ear, possible medications, treatment options, and recovery time.
Although doctors for the most part remain committed to their patients’ health, the language of health care is now increasingly more like accounting than medicine—costs, efficiency, contracting, access—in short, everything except compassion, patients, and care.
The wonderful irony is that human psychology matters for human health. There is no substitute in the diagnostic process for doctors listening to patients describe their symptoms. There is no replacing compassion and care in helping patients deal with the psychological stress of disease. There is, in short, no replacing the humane treatment that people used to receive in the U.S. and still do in many other countries.
No wonder we spend so much on health care with such poor results—we talk about the wrong things in the wrong way. This is a point Tom Peters made years ago when he noted that oil companies that talked about oil exploration actually found more oil and car companies that talked about cars enjoyed more success than companies that were fixated on financial numbers to the exclusion of what they were in the business of doing.
It would be nice to put health back into the language of health care, so that while on a stretcher, people don’t need to have memorized their insurance rules.
