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What a doctor can learn from being a patient [BostonGlobe.com]

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As an internist and infectious disease physician, I am, unfortunately, often the one who has to deliver bad news to patients and their families. But this time, as I sat in the urologist’s office in January, the dreaded words were directed at me: “You likely have cancer.”

It was ironic, I told the surgeon. In addition to being a clinician, I lead a team at the University of Massachusetts Medical School that helps state officials and health care providers implement new models of health care. Just two days earlier, I explained, I had led a retreat to kick off a pilot program for urologic cancer patients, the very thing I was about to become.

The pilot at UMass Memorial Health Care was for what’s called a “perioperative surgical home,” a model for a comprehensive type of care that starts the moment a decision for surgery is made and doesn’t end until the patient returns to the regular care of her primary care provider. The care is carefully coordinated among all the health care professionals involved in treatment, wherever that treatment takes place, and good communication is essential. The ultimate goal is to address the needs of the whole person, rather than just those of the diseased organ.

My surgeon raised his eyebrows and said, “I’d be interested in hearing how it goes for you, then.”

 

[For more of this story, written by Judith L. Steinberg, go to http://www.bostonglobe.com/mag...y.html?event=event25]

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During one of our Health Systems Agency board meetings, I read an article aloud, from the Health Law Project Library Bulletin (University of Pennsylvania), by a Family Physician who wrote about three of his patients, who taught him things that his medical school curriculum hadn't addressed.....

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