Greedy Trial Lawyer
Audio Tapes Would Improve Medical Diagnosis
Category: Seeing Clearly Now
You can slice it anyway you want. The conclusion remains the same. The rising number of medical diagnostic errors is related primarily to poor communication skills of the doctor in conversations with the patient.
QUALITY: Are Doctors Asking The Right Questions?
by Rob Cunningham
An M.D. and Harvard professor who writes for the New Yorker, Jerome Groopman is creating a widening public audience for a problem that internists have been worrying themselves about for decades: an apparent decline in physicians' clinical skills, driven at least in part by increasing dependency on high-tech diagnostic tools and financial incentives to see more and more patients.Much of the evidence comes from studies based on autopsies that reveal morbidities not detected (or treated) in living patients. One such study found major diagnostic errors in 32 percent of patients who died during stays in intensive care. Estimates of the overall rate of diagnostic error fall in the 10-15 percent range.
The bottom line, according to Groopman, is that doctors often don't ask the right questions and don't listen carefully enough when the patient answers.
My suggestion would be to tape-record all physician-patient verbal communications, just as is done "for quality purposes" by many businesses who communicate with customers by telephone. If businesses have discovered the mere fact of a recording tends to improve the communications process why not apply this simple "device" to the medical field. When poor communication skills lead to serious injuries and deaths it would seem a reasonable burden to bear.
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