The Ultimate Boss

The first day of class in high school, my chemistry teacher walked silently into the room after we were seated, took a dollar out of his pocket, and put it in a glass jar on the podium. I was confused until he explained that his actions represented what we did every day. As his students, we were the source of his paycheck and were ultimately his boss. He ran the classroom, but we had a voice.

I was reminded of this experience last week when I read an interview in Healthcare Informatics between Rasu B. Shrestha, M.D., and HCI Editor-in-Chief Mark Hagland about the 2012 Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) annual conference. Although the article was a great overview of some of the top trends and RSNA discussion topics, what really stuck with me and prompted the dollar-in-the-jar memory was Dr. Shrestha’s last statement: “Above all, you have to look at what is needed to become patient-centric, and to enable the clinician workflow that can make that a reality.”

Looking at a provider’s workflow and thinking “What can we change here to improve the patient experience?” is something I do on a daily basis. Communication is a large component of any clinician’s workflow; it takes time to gather information about a patient from the EMR, colleagues, lab and imaging test results, verbal and text-based conversations, and personal observations…. Finding solutions that can make these tasks more efficient is a win. Providers run the treatment plans, but saving a little time on communications means having more time to listen to the voice of the ultimate boss – the patient.