Connecting The Dots of Healthcare

I’ve got a six year old friend by the name of Wheaton who ended up in the hospital last week. He’s a delightfully precocious kid and wise beyond his years according to his mom. He also has decided he’s going to be a doctor.

As a ‘get well’ token, I send Wheaton a stethoscope. A real stethoscope. Not a play one, but a REAL one. One he can hear a heart with. But the directions that came in the box really didn’t have directions on listening to the most important heart sounds. I think all stethoscopes need directions like this:

“As important as it may seem for a physician, or a nurse, or anyone to hear a patient’s heart, it’s more important to listen to a patient’s heart, and speak to that heart, through the soul of the patient. You can only do this when you take the stethoscope out of your ears, and put it away.”

If physicians are to avoid becoming the commodity that so many seem to want to make us, physicians today must be sure listen to patient’s hearts without a stethoscope.

What kind of a healthcare world will it be when Wheaton could be a physician twenty years from now?

With the progressing trend to commoditized medicine, will physicians be as valued and respected?

Judging from what’s happened over the last 20 years, I’m not so sure a bright, caring child will want to enter the increasingly hostile profession of medicine. Market forces are hurting the very heart of physicians as more and more of us find non-clinical livings in healthcare. Many who would have been just the kind of caregiver anyone would ever want to have are finding professions and occupations out of medicine, nursing, and direct patient care.

Without speaking to patient’s hearts, we fail to differentiate ourselves. And an undifferentiated resource, in an increasingly complex ecosystem of healthcare, quickly becomes a commodity. Commodities, by their nature are price based, and not based on a valued relationship.

Listen to patient’s hearts. Develop valued relationships. Don’t let us become more and more commoditized.

Do it for Wheaton.