A New Look at Plan of Care and Patient Instructions

If you don’t know Jess Jacobs, she’s a passionate patient advocate that use to work for the federal government. Although, she might be best known for her tweets from the hospital. If you scroll back through her Twitter feed, I’m sure you’ll find them.

Today Jess offered up this tweet to reframe our discussion on plans of care and patient instructions:

I’m sure that most doctors will mock these instructions, but it definitely illustrates a very different relationship between doctor and patient. How many doctors go to this extent to make sure that their patients are well? I’m sure many of them are asking “I’d love to go that deep with patients, but how do I get paid for it?”

I’ve regularly argued that we need deeper interactions with a healthcare professional if we want to be truly healthy and not just continue to treat the sicknesses we have. However, I don’t think these interactions will happen with a doctor. This type of relationship needs someone that’s more social worker than doctor.

Where will all this go? I’m not sure, but seeing these patient instructions sure caused me to rethink the doctor-patient relationship.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

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