Latest / CareTalk: Healthcare. Unfiltered. / Why 15 Minutes with a Patient Is Never Enough

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Why 15 Minutes with a Patient Is Never Enough · CareTalk: Healthcare. Unfiltered.

• 0:06
  You just went through kind of a, I would think is traumatic experience with your mom's illness and passing, so I'm sorry for that.
• 0:14
  But that brings you right into it in the healthcare system as a sort of a, a creative critic and analyst, as well as a practitioner, as well as, you know, part of the patient, you know, family.
• 0:29
  Any insights into how people are leveraging AI right now, and what some of the gaps in critical care for, for, for loved ones are right now that we still need to think about solving either through more humans or better technology?
• 0:46
  Mm-hmm.
• 0:47
  So I would say, John, you know, I've spent my entire life being on the, on the other end, which is walking through a hospital hallway, going into someone's room, interacting, uh, with them for, you know, several minutes, and then walking out of that room and, and having to, you know, having to be able to separate the severity and the seriousness of what they're going through from anything else that you might be thinking about in your life.
• 1:15
  Because if, if that-- if you allow that to weigh on your mind every time you walk into a room, you wouldn't, you wouldn't be able to function.
• 1:21
  Um, but then the reverse is true when you yourself are either a patient or you're family member.
• 1:27
  In this case, my mom was a patient.
• 1:29
  And I would say that the scarcest resource… You know, we think about resources in, in healthcare, and people focus on how much, what percentage of our GDP we spend on healthcare, how much drug costs, how much hospitals cost, all this stuff.
• 1:44
  Economists, policymakers focus on all that stuff.
• 1:47
  And I have sort of over the last couple years come to the realization, at least for me, that the scarcest resource is actually time.
• 1:56
  You know, a physician can spend 15 minutes with a patient.
• 2:00
  That's n- that's nowhere near enough.
• 2:02
  Like, if you have a, if you have a loved one with dementia and you go into your PCP's office with your mom or your dad, and all they have is 15 minutes and that's not enough to provide comfort to somebody.
• 2:13
  It's enough to solve maybe a medical problem.
• 2:15
  May not even be enough for that.
• 2:17
  But I think that, you know, we have become very constrained in our ability to spend that resource, which is, which is time.
• 2:26
  And, you know, nowadays when I'm in the hospital, I kinda think about the way I interact with people differently.
• 2:33
  Like, I used to go into hospital rooms and kind of focus mostly on the medical stuff, and that's obviously important, but there's part, large parts of the team who do that.
• 2:41
  I actually just try to go in there and, and think to myself, "My goal is that this person should feel better when I leave this room than when I enter the room." And that, that's my goal