The healthcare system is supposed to be designed to facilitate and promote the healing of the sick. That’s the entire reason I became a physician is to help heal the sick.
Unfortunately, the system has frequently failed to live up to that ideal. I learned that from having a conversation with Matthew Zachary, CEO of We the Patients, a patient advocacy organization. In a recent LinkedIn post, in fact, Mr. Zachary wrote this:
Prior auth takes longer than the time between scan and surgery. Drugs get denied because someone flipped a spreadsheet cell from green to red. Surprise bills show up because the hospital was in network but the anesthesiologist’s LLC was not.
None of this is a glitch. This is the product working exactly as designed. Built to maximize profit and gaslight us into believing WE are the problem for not “navigating” it better.
This is horribly unfortunate, and Matthew Zachary is harnessing his anger at this reality to make a difference through his activism.
There are indeed a lot of problems with the current healthcare system, and fixing them will take a lot of time, effort, and work. And there is one thing we physicians can do to immediately help make things better for the patient: make an intentional effort to overwhelm our patients with compassion.
No one wants to be sick. No one wants to willingly engage with the healthcare system. And when they do, it is because there is a threat to their life and limb.
With the way the current insurance system is set up, it is not uncommon that patients face myriad barriers and pain points to get the care they need. I myself have experienced these barriers and pain points with my own healthcare and that of my family. It can add more stress to an already extremely stressful situation.
How can we help mitigate this stress? Overwhelm our patients with kindness and compassion. Give them a big smile; hold their hand; tell them that we will do everything to help them feel better.
And if they will not get better; if our patient is going to die, then we need to do everything in our power to ensure a death with dignity, comfort, and ease.
Aren’t we supposed to be doing this all along? Most definitely. And, as is the norm of the human condition, we tend to forget amid the drudgery of the day in and day out of working in healthcare and dealing with the very same barriers to care and pain points with which our patients are also dealing.
That’s why I’m so grateful for Matthew Zachary. He has the courage to share his incredible story of illness and recovery and his anger at the system that did not help promote his healing to try and do something about it.
And his story, and his activism, was a potent reminder for me to do all that I can to make my patients in the ICU as comfortable as possible, to make them feel as good as a critically ill person can possibly feel. Will I fail at times? Yes. But I pray that, for the rest of my career, I will keep trying to overwhelm my patients and kindness and compassion. That’s what I can do to help the healthcare system today.
Listen to the entire conversation: https://www.healthcaremusings.com/we-the-patients-are-really-pissed-off-my-conversation-with-matthew-zachary/
