This is not an official University of Utah Health Sciences publication and is only intended to serve as a display of my writing ability.

Fifty-six percent of all Americans own a smart phone. The term nomophobia has been coined and accepted into our lexicon to describe the fear and rush of anxiety that may accompany some when being without their phone. Computer users report an average of 66 hours per week staring at their monitor. One in eight people are addicted to the internet.

Since the advent of iPhones and MacBooks, people have grown tethered to their smart phone screens and laptop monitors, while at the same time human affection and connection has decreased in all walks of life. The health care profession is no different.

“[The thing that health care needs to change the most] is the understanding of the significance of the loss of compassion and empathy in the entire spectrum of health enterprises,” said President and CEO of the Arnold P. Gold Foundation Richard Levin.

The clinician-patient must be maximized to enhance the hospital visit experience to its fullest potential.

“In every health encounter—institutional, ambulatory care, it doesn’t matter,” Levin said. “The availability of technologies that actually make a difference over the course of an illness, and the acceptance by clinicians of the need to be efficient, to follow the value equation—which is value equals quality over dollars—has caused us to lose sight of the fact that this began and must remain a human interaction between clinician and patient.”

Levin believes two factors, keeping the importance technology in perspective and responsibility of hospital leadership, can ensure that human interaction remains paramount in health care.

 Deemphasizing Technology in the Patient Experience

The prominence of technology in protocol and procedures has increased since 1819, while the importance of human contact has been on the decline.

“Technology is actually neutral,” Levin said. “It’s neither a good nor bad thing. It’s how it’s used, and whether we’re aware of its potential to move us way from the critical challenge, which is to reestablish contact. We began to lose it curiously, paradoxically with [René] Laennec’s invention of the stethoscope.”

Physician visits were a much more intimate experience.

“In order to listen to the wheezing of a person with asthma or the burbling of someone with pneumonia, you had to put your ear on the patient’s chest,” Levin said. “With the invention of the stethoscope, which amplified the sound, it moved the doctor away from the patient physically. In many ways, we’ve been on that pathway now for over 200 years.”

Levin’s aim is to arm medical students with a well-rounded knowledge and comprehension of humanity early in their educational track in lieu of guidance on how to use the latest gadgets.

“We need to change the nature of health professions education so that the conversations about these very difficult, complex, basic problems in human existence can be understood before our students hit the first wall of transition, which is from studying biology to taking a pulse, meeting a patient, being in the hurly-burly world of the academic medical center,” Levin said.

“And [we need] to get the student involved to understand how strong the pull will be of what academics refer to as the hidden curriculum, the curriculum that is the process of being socialized into becoming a practicing physician.”

Influencing Leadership

It starts at the top. Levin believes an open dialogue with thought leaders across the industry regarding the increase of human compassion in hospitals and research institutions is a necessary component of the development of the health care system.

“And the second thing is an understanding by the top of the chain in what have become hospital city-states—remarkable organizations that have extraordinary power in local or huge geographies,” Levin said. “There must be a recognition that in that value equation is this fundamental human value that will in fact result, not only in a better bottom line, but in the salvation of health care in the United States. And encouraging the conversation will allow us to move back to the future.”

Levin predicts that backtracking to a more human-oriented emphasis during treatment will be essential.

“The concern is that we have allowed a system to develop– and that’s an active thing we did—which seems to fail to recognize the value of this most fundamental of the core elements of scientifically excellent practice,” Levin said. “I think it will be fine, but we do need to go through this process of recovery.”

Overall, Levin has mixed views of the future of health care.

“I’m hopeful and frightened,” Levin said. “I’m hopeful because touring around the entire country, interviewing medical students about this perspective humanism and medicine, they are as good, as turned on, as engaged, as hopeful, as any group of medical students in my lifetime. So that’s fantastic. If anything, the system is encouraging a group of people who could be humanist in practice.

Ultimately, patients need to feel that they’re in a safe harbor in order to be completely open, to be truthful, to be intimate, to be accepted by another human being whose sole purpose in being there is taking care of that individual. Research has shown that compassionate care improves health outcomes.”

If the health care field is able to revert back to an emphasis on human connection that was prevalent before Laennec’s invention of the stethoscope, physicians will be listening in to much more fulfilled hearts.

 

 

 

This is not an official University of Utah/a> Health Sciences publication and is only intended to serve as a display of my writing ability.

“It takes a village …” is as cliché as it gets in today’s culture.

Yet to thrive in the ever-changing multicultural climate of health care education, the communal value encrypted in this classic idiom remains a necessary factor in the equation of success for University of Utah Health Sciences.

“Something we’re actively working on is really creating an environment that promotes inclusive excellence across the health sciences,” said Associate vice president for Health Equity and Inclusion at University of Utah Health Sciences Ana Maria Lopez, M.D., M.P.H.

“And it’s really thinking that, you know, we are facing complex problems in health care, and to face and address complex problems we need everybody’s voice.”

A two-sided course of action has been cultivated by Lopez to construct an ecosystem of inclusion among the five schools and colleges of University of Utah Health Sciences, aiming to inform and involve the more than 14,000 faculty and staff.

Inform

Lopez believes a world-class healthcare education institution must feature a wide variety of resources to pool from and she has recently arranged for different speakers to visit campus to illustrate her directive.

“We’re a learning community and during the past few months we’ve had the opportunity to learn,” Lopez said.

“We’ve had visitors come and share their experiences. [The author of The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies] Scott E. Page gave such a wonderful talk where he talked about if you want to be a B institution then you have a homogenous environment. If you want to be A+ you want to have a heterogeneous diverse environment.”

After a series of speakers like Page visit campus, empirical data will be collected and scrutinized to gauge the progress that has been made.

“So I think as speakers come and as we learn, we start to move the needle forward in all of the different constituencies so that we can begin to test,” Lopez said.

Assessments will then be made centered around interviews of select personnel.

“It really is an evidence-based science so there are best practices,” Lopez said. “Then there are experiments that we can do, perhaps in reviewing candidates to blind, gender, race, ethnicity, and look and see what kind of selections are made when we’re blinded. So to really address unconscious bias in a serious way may be one experiment that could be done.”

Involve

Before achieving her grand objective, Lopez also knows it will take a personal touch to lay the groundwork for an ideal campus climate.

“I’m early in the process, and I’m really trying to engage as many folks as possible,” Lopez said. “I am limited by the fact that there are so many waking hours, and the campus and the number of people, it’s a lot. But yeah, so I wish I could do that more quickly, but I do think that that step-by-step meeting folks and engaging people at the one-on-one level is important.”

No one person can be counted on to inspire increases in inclusion, but Lopez has assumed the charge of acting as a catalyst for change by building personal connections with thought leaders across campus.

“The first thing has been to really engage more folks around this, so they’re representatives from each school, from each college, each program,” Lopez said. “Then there are partners that we need to really help work so that everybody feels that inclusive excellence is part of what they need to do.”

A communal approach must be shared among the different departments.

“Right, and really so that everybody feels it’s their responsibility,” Lopez said. “The faculty in medicine, the faculty in psychiatry, they all have specific goals for their faculty, so what’s great for me is to be able to work as a resource, provide best practices, and then have the departments set the path out for themselves.”

The principal goal of Lopez’s personal connections will be to accountability and influence of individuals throughout University of Utah Health Sciences’ colleges and schools.

“Some people might say, “Well, we have to attract people from the outside, growing your own takes time,” all of these are true but we’re in it for the long term,” Lopez said. “We know that in order to care for our patients we want to be more reflective of the population. The University of Utah is so committed to quality and excellence. In order to do that, we need to address inclusive excellence from all ends.”

But after the significant investment of resources and time required to carry out these plans, Lopez believes Utah Health Sciences will improve its influence on the health and well-being of Utah residents.

“I think that the impact would really be seen in moving the institution forward from a quality and an excellence perspective so that we will really be better than we were.”

The University of Utah “village” will reap the benefits for the foreseeable future.