“The huge rise in complaints in relation to communication and a lack of respect are of particular concern. Patients are not receiving the compassion, dignity and respect which they deserve.”

As clinical trial technology guys, you would assume that we love code more than we love the patients and site coordinators who use our software.

I took a random sample of  home pages from 3 of our competitors – and this is what I found.   We can discuss if real-time visibility to  data is going to make the clinical operations team more effective or not – but that is a story for another post.

EMPOWER YOUR CLINICAL TRIAL EDC + ePRO and a bunch of other features to make your clinical trial successful. ( viedoc )

Oracle Health Sciences InForm. Accelerate Clinical Trial Timelines While Reducing Trial Cost and Risk.

Collect and deliver higher-quality data faster through advanced data capture and query management, real-time visibility to data, standards-based, integrated workflows, and security best practices.

Faster, smarter medical research. Castor is the end-to-end data solution, enabling researchers to easily capture and integrate data from any source on one platform. Thousands of medical device, biotech, and academic researchers around the world are using Castor EDC (Electronic Data Capture), ePRO, and eTMF to accelerate their studies.

In this article we’ll discuss the doctor-patient communications gap as a generic problem. We will briefly examine the root cause of the problem and conclude by proposing a light-weight easy-to-use Web service for sharing and private messaging with patients and physicians as a way to ameliorate the problem.

Poor patient-doctor communications as a generic problem

Doctor-Patient communication is the key to the success of a treatment plan and reduction of hospital readmission. However, doctors and nurses often fail in communicating with their patients properly.

What is the nature of poor doctor-patient communications?

Some patients say that their doctors need to polish their communication skills; although they are excellent diagnosticians.

Other patients say that their doctors know how to talk, but seem to have no time to listen.

Many patients also complain that their doctors don’t explain things in terms patients can understand. Poor communications between doctors/nurses and their patients can come at a high cost, creating misunderstandings that can  lead to malpractice suits.

In a hospital setting, we often hear that patients feel that they are not getting any useful information while the medical staff feel that they have taken the time to communicate all the data that the patients and their families need in order to understand and comply with the treatment plan.

The question is why some doctors find it hard to communicate properly and share things with their patients in a desired manner while other doctors succeed in communicating the therapeutic plan to the patient in a manner that the patient understands.

Poor physician-patient communications is rooted in cognitive and cultural gaps

Patients are the experts at their personal feelings and experiences.  Physicians are the experts in the medical science.  Cultural and language differences and preconceived notions about the doctors role only contribute to the cognitive gap between emotion and science.

Besides the cultural and cognitive gaps, high patient volume and work overload is another root contributor to poor doctor patient communications.  This generally happens in poor countries. In the third world, working over capacity is one of the biggest barriers to effective communication. Hospitals, doctors and nurses are forced to admit more and more patients and are compelled to handle more than they can manage. Under such circumstances, health professionals cannot devote enough time to their patients let alone sit down with them in a quiet corner and explain the therapeutic plan.

Sharing and private messaging with patients  and doctors helps bridge the gaps

The solutions are out there.

In this always-on age of mobile medical devices and cloud services, both healthcare professionals and the patients have immediate access to the latest solutions that can help them communicate more effectively and efficiently. There are private social networks for healthcare that have been exclusively developed for sharing and private messaging with doctors, nurses and patients, enabling doctors and patients to interact and share where and whenever they need the interaction.

Neither the patient nor the physician need to be tied down to a proprietary healthcare provider portal.

Secure Web-based sharing and private messaging services improve the ways doctors and nurses communicate with their patients. This helps them improve the quality of service and lower operational costs, and enables doctors to treat more patients in less time and with less stress.