By John Durante
On a recent holiday weekend I chaperoned an elderly aunt (with dangerous, painful but not life-threatening injuries), into the frightening world of American emergency medicine. Naturally, the ER was scary in encountering the wide assortment of wailing patients being stepped around by emergency transport pros amid panicked family members. Each passing hour (we were there for ten), reminded us of the great need for healthcare reform and the continuing social and economic danger we face without it.
But from my professional perspective that I called on to help pass the time, another, perhaps even more sinister danger was observed. Emergency doctors were drowning in data. To complete diagnosis and start appropriate treatment, physicians spent the majority of their time “connecting the dots” of informational components that included patient histories, diagnostic results, and physician phone consultations, vital sign reports and the like. Naturally all of these are important components to any emergency care. But in what I observed, digesting the information was such a burden that it significantly interfered with providing care.
Data and information must be digested, for doctors and everyone else of course, because in most cases broader context is needed to learn the “story.” None of us would want a doctor to provide care while guessing. The doctors on this day were proficient in sorting through the massive amounts of patient information (much of it duplicative) in an environment that was not conducive to reading or hearing anything. But this compelled them to be tethered to computer terminals and telephones and only seldom permitted them to see and “touch” patients and talk with their naturally anxious families. (My aunt’s ten hours included total physician contact just shy of six minutes!)
Meanwhile, well-intended nurses, technicians and other support staff would dutifully complete their work. Of course the readings and reports resulting from these efforts steepened the knowledge curve for the docs. In watching professionals flail about in this dynamic for hours I couldn’t help but wonder: Where was the appropriate practitioner who was a context-building agent? Where was the person dedicated to physician briefing, information retrieval and the like? The person who could share the patient’s “story” in a way that connected all the dots and the bits and bytes of data so that a complete (and accurate) diagnosis could be made?
It is axiomatic in all professions that to know the “truth”, one must first have the facts. In such a time-sensitive environment such as a hospital emergency room, why are doctors left to wrestle with the facts and build the “truth” by themselves while overwhelmed by data? Why does the model of treatment not place a trained professional front and center to continually provide patient context to physicians? The entire experience illustrates to me yet again that the importance for creating, organizing and sharing your story is not confined to marketing or public relations. It can also be a life and death matter. And for that reason, it requires more than passing attention. Without data, there is no knowledge. Without knowledge, there can be no context. But without the story pulling together the data, knowledge and the context, how successful can we be, in public relations, or in medicine?
John Durante is senior marketing associate for WordWrite Communications.
