Rules of Patient Engagement: How to Deeply Connect with Empathy

By Barbara Ficarra, RN, BSN, MPA In my recent post on KevinMD, “Deeply connect and engage your patients with empathy,” I write about how empathy is essential to help empower our patients. “It is with empathy that we can engage and empower our patients.” Doctors and nurses are leaders in health care. Being a great leader means having a clear vision, mission or goal.  It means being committed, and knowing how to listen and communicate,…

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When Doctors and Nurses Work Together

By Barbara Ficarra, RN, BSN, MPA From KevinMD’s medical blog, in a recent post, Kevin Pho, MD answers the question, “Is the doctor-patient relationship really more sacrosanct than the nurse-patient relationship?” posed by Theresa Brown from the Well Blog, The New York Times Health Blog. The answer is “clearly no” writes Pho. Physicians have the ultimate responsibility for treatment decisions, but because nurses spend so much more time with hospital patients than doctors do, we…

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Technology Is Not The Reason For Cost Escalation in Health Care – It Is How We Misuse It

Guest post by Stephen C. Schimpff, MD We are often told that the reason for the high cost of medical care is all of our new technologies and drugs. There is an element of truth in that but when used correctly, new technologies save lives and improve the quality of patient care and often improve safety.  But technologies used inappropriately increase costs while not improving quality and may adversely impact safety. Here is a patient…

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Dr. Bill Crounse Talks with Todd Park: Comparing Health Insurance Plans Made Easy

By Barbara Ficarra, RN, BSN, MPA Microsoft’s Dr. Bill Crounse Talks with Todd Park, CTO of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, on Health Tech Today There is a plethora of health information for consumers today.  We are surrounded by smart meaningful material, but somehow it is easy to get lost in the maze of information.  We get stuck navigating through it and we find it hard to obtain information that is right…

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