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by DanielBMarkham 2728 days ago
My Primary Care Physician is unable to speak coherent sentences.

I'm half-joking, of course. The guy is top-rated, elected head of the state association. He's widely-regarded as a combination of both brilliant with diagnostics and good with people. He just can't complete a sentence when we meet.

Why? Because he's got some pad he carries around that takes up all of his attention span. He comes into the room, sits down -- and there's this struggle for his attention that I watch play out. It usually involves a lot of verbal grunts.

"So we've got this .... er.. .. and it looks .. hmmmm. .... So this is...."

This could go on for a bit. Eventually we get to either a statement or a question.

Frankly I'd think the guy was having some sort of mental issues if it weren't for the facts that 1) he used to be fine before they all started carrying around pads, and 2) he's fine outside the clinic.

I really hope that the tech community has helped make healthcare better. It's certainly had an impact.

3 comments

Maybe not relevant for you, but one thing that has helped me with my doctor is that the first thing I do when I go in is sum up what happened in our previous couple of visits. My doctor doesn't have enough time to prep for my visit. I mean, he should, but he doesn't (been there, done that). So I give him the executive summary to speed things up. I visit my doctor a lot, so he now trusts me to give him accurate and useful information.
It's a shame too, because this sort of nonsense is driving people to go to doc in a box and urgent care type operations.
Some provider organizations hire medical scribes to sit in the exam room and do real time EHR data entry so that the doctor can focus on the patient.