It was an exciting year with our fresh re-design. Traffic continues to grow year-over-year and the new 33 charts weekly newsletter continues to take on new subscribers every day. Thank you to everyone who visited and helped make 33c a success.

Big Shot Doctors

Patients don’t talk about your title, they talk about what you do. If all you have to pull people in the door is a label, you’ve got work to do.

Are Hospitals Responsible for What Doctors Say?

You can’t control what someone publishes any more than you can control what they say. And the day we hold the 20-year-old marketing intern responsible for a doctor’s behavior is the day we’re all in trouble.

The More You See The Harder Medicine Gets

Medicine is easy when you don’t look hard. This is the double edged sword of experience. Alot of doctors who stop looking at mid career. While consistent repetition has its place, comfort zones can be dangerous. The trick is to surround yourself with people who challenge your assumptions and push your limits.

I got the idea for this post from Dr. John Mandrola’s Twitter bio.

Should We Consider Patient Bias?

Patients bring their own biases to the exam room. Parents have an action bias, for example. As a tertiary specialist facing children with chronic complaints, parents are prone to doing things. They are suggestible. Tests and movement of any kind are seen as a step forwad. Classically this parental action bias is supported by a system that rewards doing things to patients.

Whiteboard Beats EHR

As most of my readers and patients know, collaborative thinking on a dry erase white board are central to patient encounters in my clinic. The arrows, lines, schematic images, and emphasizing enclosure boxes that happen in real-time create a resource that has no written equivalent.

Patient Experience and the Art of Visiting

To ‘visit’ is a characteristically southern reference. It implies easy, relaxed conversation that’s genuine and unstructured. It’s fitting of an interaction that’s focused and real. I had never heard the term before moving to Texas in the early 90’s. It’s a description more often used by families of my rural patients and my mother-in-law.

Who Owns a Physician’s Smartphone?

Not all physicians feel that enterprise health applications deserve real estate on their personal phone….Expect a turf war around which health apps live where and what access an institution has to data and activity on a physician’s (or hospital’s) device.

We Heard You Were the Best Doctor

In our most vulnerable moments we want to believe we’re in the most capable hands. Whether we are or we aren’t.

This post generated the most direct messages and outreach. Remarkable how that can happen with just a couple hundred words.

Doctors Training and the Test of Will

While physicians can’t be compared to the Special Forces, there are features necessary for success including the will to persist.

Why Doctors Still Use Fax Machines

Instead of questioning doctors about the persistence of the fax machine perhaps we should ask those who have failed to shape the technology to replace it.

Thank you again for reading. I want to wish everyone a happy, healthy new year and I hope to see everyone back in 2018.

Image from Flickr – Modified from PhillyCam