Will Health IT End Up Being a “White Hat” or “Black Hat” Element in Physician Engagement?

I read with genuine fascination a report published in Saturday’s New York Times, entitled “Doctors Unionize to Resist the Medical Machine,” with a deck that stated that “An Oregon medical center’s plan to increase efficiency by outsourcing doctors drove a group of its hospitalists to fight back by banding together.” I would urge readers to read the entire article, which can be found here.

The article, by Noam Scheiber, tells the rather complicated story of developments in the past couple of years at PeaceHealth Sacred Heart Medical Center in Springfield, Oregon. The story is rather involved, and has numerous elements. But what particularly interested me was how the Times report framed the situation as a set of conflicts over hospitalist productivity and patient throughput, versus the quality of patient care outcomes and patient and physician satisfaction. The binary conceptual framing of the issues is far from new in healthcare: indeed, many in the industry still seem to believe that one can have either lower costs based on high clinician productivity and “assembly line” types of approaches to delivering patient care, or one can have high outcomes quality and patient and especially physician satisfaction, but never (or at least rarely) both. And that perception really is a problem. For the full article click here 

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