Communicating with Your Healthcare Team

How you communicate with your doctor impacts your health. It can even make a difference between life and death. But it can be hard. Your doctor may use medical terms you can’t understand. And with time-squeezed appointments, doctors often rush and/or interrupt patients. Moreover, when you’re dealing with a serious health condition, you feel stressed […]

“You don’t know what you don’t know.” It might be a tired adage, but it readily applies to navigating the medical world. Certainly, you need to understand health information for the best chance of a good outcome. But understanding medical information is harder than most realize. Understanding medical information requires health literacy – the ability […]

It has become a common sight – doctors with their laptops or tablets, conversing with patients while navigating through Electronic Health Records (EHRs), searching, and typing. What do doctors think about Electronic Health Records? Would you be surprised to hear that EHRs add to doctors’ stress? EHRs have certainly impacted the type of interactions we […]

We’re all accustomed to seeing our doctors use their computer or tablet during appointments and in the hospital since electronic health records (EHRs) are widely used. Can you trust electronic health records? Is the information in EHRs accurate? Do EHRs add to doctor stress, potentially impacting care? Although there are clear advantages of EHRs, there […]

It’s a scenario that repeats over and over, every day, in doctors’ offices everywhere. Patients, and perhaps their family members, listen intently as doctors discuss diagnoses, tests, procedures, and medications. All too often, patients are not writing anything down, presumably because they think they will remember everything they are hearing. Unfortunately, the opposite is true […]