By: Dr. Joseph Kvedar, Vice President, Connected Health, Partners HealthCare

In fact, a painting by the artist Fildes, from the late 1800s, depicts the purity of the patient doctor relationship. The patient in the painting, a child, will most likely die. But you see the doctor, at her bedside, at the family’s home, providing whatever care, comfort and compassion he could.

Fast forward to today. If you ask individuals finishing residency training and applying for their first jobs as attending physicians about their motivations, you’ll find that their answer will likely not be about helping people.  There are many reasons for this predictable change. In the last few years, frustration with electronic medical records has risen to the top of the list.  Most doctors quickly generalize these frustrations to include other technologies in the care delivery process.  That makes it tough for those of us making the case that technology can play an important role in improving care delivery.

I was privileged to speak at TEDx BeaconStreet this past fall, and chose to talk about this dilemma.  Many of the concepts in that talk are also covered in my recent book, The New Mobile Age: How Technology Will Extend the Healthspan and Optimize the Lifespan.

As healthcare providers, we’ve lost our way when it comes to the power of caring.  For more than 20 years, we’ve known that there is a positive correlation between a caring doctor/patient relationship and improved health outcomes.  Yet, for providers, today’s healthcare model creates unhappiness and frustration, forcing us to spend time on data entry, dealing with reimbursement issues and other mundane tasks instead of focusing our attention on caring for our patients.  And as our schedules come under more and more pressure, we will spend the allotted 7-10 minutes per office visit just skimming over each patient’s health problems, like a rock skipping on top of a body of water. All this is being compounded by the fact that, as our population ages — the older we get the more healthcare we need — we will run out of healthcare providers and caregivers.

What time is left to care, you ask? Read the rest of the blog here

NOTE:  Hear more from Dr. Joe Kvedar at HIMSS18. Dr. Kvedar is delivering the opening keynote at the Innovation Leaders Program at HIMSS18 on Tuesday, March 6, 10:40-11:05am. Get 25% off  & use code ILP1825! Register today!