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Showing posts with label Body Language and Patient Care. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Body Language and Patient Care. Show all posts

How to Use Tech Tools in the Doctors Office and Still Serve Your Patient.

How to Use Tech Tools in the Doctors Office and Still Serve Your Patient.
I speak  to  and consult with Doctors, Nurses and other Health Care professionals about body language and patient care and advise hospitals and medical offices on how to design their office space and use technology in ways that best serve the patient and the bottom line.  There are 4 new tech tools that have the potential to interrupt the rapport and trust that needs to occur between the patient and the health care professional.
Steps for Using Technology in Patient Care to Show More
 The most important thing to remember is to think, look at, touch and interact with the patient First before thinking about looking at, touching or interacting with technology. So for example coming in with your smart phone (that now has the EKG technology available) in your hand and ready to show the patient as you are introduced. Have it put away. Greet the patient, establish rapport, discuss the technology then show the technology in a way that makes it a part of the two of you as a unit rather than the technology as the magic device. If the patient is male that means standing or siting side by side with them as you introduce the technology if the patient is a women that means ideally interacting face to face and introducing the technology. (See my blogs and articles on side by side vs face to face.)
 Below are the four new tech tools. Which ones are you using in your office.
Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net.

4 tech tools that are disrupting the doctor's office
Need to take an ECG? There's an app for that now.
n 2013, technology permeated health care like never before. Diagnostics came to our smartphones, robots came to our surgery rooms, and Dr. Phil invested in a startup that wants to facilitate online doctors' visits.
Here are four groundbreaking medical tools that either hit shelves or revved up development this year:

AliveCor
(Facebook/AliveCor)
A smartphone case that can charge your phone is handy, but a smartphone case that can record and transmit an ECG takes the cake. This spring, the FDA approved AliveCor, a black case with silver censors, for over-the-counter sales. The tool helps users monitor their heart palpitations by simply placing her fingers over the censors, then transmitting the recording to a doctor.
This has several benefits. First, any patient experiencing the kind of random heart arrhythmia they can't self-induce in a doctor's office can simply buy one, record when the irregularity occurs, and send the data to a doctor. After a doctor diagnoses the problem and writes a prescription, the device can also serve to gather information about how a prescription is working.
A third benefit: AliveCor can help reassure a patient with a harmless or even phantom murmur that nothing is wrong — making life a little easier for hypochondriacs and their doctors.
CellScope Oto
(Facebook/CellScope)
This one is especially beneficial for physicians who work with children, and therefore parents.
The tool is essentially a camera-fitted Otoscope (that flashlight thing doctors stick in your ear during a physical) that attaches to a smartphone. The doctor can view the inside of a patient's ear, take photos of an ear drum, and store those photos for later use. Then, when a patient has an ear ache, the doctor can compare the photos taken during a healthy physical with the new photos to both make a diagnosis, and help parents understand what's going on inside their children's ears.
If the CellScope Oto becomes available to parents, they could perform ear exams on their children and send the photos to a doctor. This could help them avoid unnecessary doctor's visits, where the kids risk picking up a bug in a waiting room.
The anesthesiologist robot
(Sedasys Video)
Anesthesiologists, some of the highest paid doctors, are responsible for administering sedation and keeping a patient ticking during surgeries. This year, Johnson & Johnson released what some are calling a robot anesthesiologist — a system named Sedasys that "automates the sedation of many patients undergoing colon-cancer screenings called colonoscopies," says The Wall Street Journal.
Anesthesiologists see big problems with the bots, warning they may not be able to respond accurately to complications. But tests so far show the machines are not only safe, but may even reduce the risk of over-sedation. And hospitals see a clear benefit: Cost. J&J will lease the machines to doctor's offices for about $150 per procedure, compared to the $600 to $2,000 that anesthesiologists typically charge.
Scanadu Scout
(Scanadu Press Releases)
This year, a Silicon Valley startup drew funding to develop a device fit for Spock: A small tricorder shaped like a hockey puck that can monitor all kinds of vital signs. By holding it up to the temple, a patient can monitor her heart rate, temperature, and respiratory rate as well as measure oxygen levels in blood, and run an electrocardiogram.
This could be a kind of holy grail of telemedicine — something that allows patients to communicate a lot of health data quickly and remotely to their doctors.
Again, this could help nervous types avoid unnecessary emergency visits, and allow doctors to urge those in trouble to go to the emergency room stat. Scanadu hopes to have it set and ready to ship by early 2015.



Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.
Posted by Patti Wood at

Is It Time for Doctors to Ditch the White Coat? First Impressions in Health Care



Is It Time for Doctors to Ditch the White Coat? First Impressions in Health Care

You go to the doctor and he or she walks into the room with that clinical white coat. How does that effect their first impression? And how does that effect you as the patient. You may know that I speak on body language and patient care so I particularly interested in the latest research on doctors white coats.


Is it time for doctors to ditch the white coat?
The traditional uniform is causing more problems than you think


Anyone who has considered medicine as a career imagines walking into a white, clean exam room with the power to comfort and heal the sick. To add to this angelic fantasy, we do not forget to imagine ourselves wearing a freshly laundered white coat bearing what only many years of arduous education and sleepless nights can provide: First name, last name, M.D.
The white coat is a badge of perseverance, intelligence, empowerment, and authority — for new interns, a reassurance that they have what it takes to take care of the life of another. But this Victorian symbol of purity and sanitation may soon go the way of the lobotomy.
I recently returned from an interview at Mayo Clinic, where I was surprised to see so many business suits. As one of the world's meccas for medicine and health care, I expected a place that resembled, well, a hospital. Instead I encountered what appeared to be a fancy hotel with a curiously large number of wheelchairs.
The rationale behind the white coat restriction makes sense given Mayo's dedication to providing the best for patient care and comfort. The organization's philosophy: The white coat builds a barrier between patient and physician, increasing the chances for the patient to feel anxious.
And Mayo patients seem to like it. Surveys have found that patients felt most comfortable when physicians wore scrubs, followed by semi-formal/business attire, then followed last by white coats. In order to maintain its high standards of professionalism, Mayo went with the suit and eschewed the white coat. (The only ones who can wear white coats in public are those in scrubs coming from or going to the OR.)
In a separate 2005 report published in the British Medical Journal, researchers found that patients preferred doctors wearing semiformal attire — defined as dark pants and long-sleeved shirt with a tie for men, and dark-colored skirts or pants with a blouse for women. Those ensembles beat out the white coat, formal wear, and casual attire.
Mayo is not alone in recognizing the symbolic power of the white coat. As Jean-Phillip Okhovat, a UCLA medical student, puts it, "I think the white coat creates an immediate sense of hierarchy. Not wearing a white coat makes it less intimidating for the parent and child."
In psychiatry, the white coat can not only add to this patient-physician barrier, but also become a target of aggression for patients with a history of troubled visits to the doctor. Yang Yu, a University of California, Irvine, medical student, recalls, "Mentally ill patients can perceive the white coat as a threat. There have been instances of people in white coats who were attacked."
Inevitably, when the topic of white coats comes up, the issue of spreading infections is never far away. Even as someone who works in health care, the white coat can sometimes make me cringe. I have no idea how many hundreds of patients that coat rubbed up against, and sometimes I can tell that the coat has not been washed in weeks. The gloves get changed, the paper on the examination bed gets rolled out, and copious amounts of hand sanitizer are used, but none of that may matter if the biggest culprit is right on the doctor's clothes.
In one study, researchers found that doctor's white coats were contaminated with all kinds of bacteria, including Staphylococci resistant to penicillin, erythromycin, and clindamycin. The worst areas were the sides of the white coat, the cuffs, collars, and pockets.
The National Health Service in the U.K. has already banned the use of long-sleeved white coats, and instead adopted a "bare below the elbows" rule to reduce unnecessary infections. The NHS also requires that doctors leave their uniforms at the workplace, where it is regularly laundered to reduce cross-contamination. This policy has already shown a marked reduction in infections. (I should mention, however, that despite evidence showing that white coats harbor bacteria, many professionals remain unconvinced that this makes a difference in terms of nosocomial infections.)
Every July and August of each year, recently admitted medical students don fresh white coats to symbolize the beginnings of this arduous yet rewarding journey toward becoming a physician. But the tone is changing as physicians continuously ask themselves how best to serve their patients. As Don Berwick, a Harvard Medical School professor and former Administrator of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, put it at the commencement for the Yale School of Medicine in 2010:
Those who suffer need you to be something more than a doctor; they need you to be a healer. And to become a healer, you must do something even more difficult than putting your white coat on. You must take your white coat off.
When you take off that white coat in the sacred presence of those for whom you will care — in the sacred presence of people just like you — when you take off that white coat, and tower not over them, but join those you serve, you become a healer in the world of fear and fragmentation.

Is it time for doctors to ditch the white coat?
The traditional uniform is causing more problems than you think













Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.
Posted by Patti Wood at
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