Health Care Insider: Recent Episodes
The Scope, University of Utah Health
These are the conversations happening inside health care that will transform health care. Experts talk about the challenges and opportunities facing the American health care system and how to provide the best health care value to the consumer. Please visit TheScopeRadio.com to be part of the conversation or request to talk about a topic.
Divergent thinking and accepting failure as an important part of a learning process are part of what it means to be creative in medicine, according to Dr. Jay Baruch, director of the Concentration in Medical Humanities and Ethics at Brown University. He speaks with Dr. Gretchen Case about how doctors can tap into their own creative senses, why it's so important to do so, and how physicians can use creativity to engage better with patients.
Sometimes a complex health concept is best explained through an analogy — an easily understood comparison of two different ideas. A medical analogy can be an effective communicative tool for any physician. For example, saying “the heart is like a pump” basically helps anyone to understand how the heart works. Dr. Evonne Kaplan-Liss, physician and journalist at Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brooke School of Journalism, says analogies can also help physicians connect with patients. Learn more about what makes for a good medical analogy.
Children with autism spectrum disorder are hospitalized more often than other children. Dr. Paul Carbone and his team of researchers and physicians from University of Utah took an in-depth look at this unnecessary trend of hospitalizations. Their findings were recently presented at the 2015 Pediatrics Academic Societies conference in San Diego, California. Listen to find out why this happens what can be done about it.
Dr. David Sundwall, the former Director of the Utah Department of Health and Professor of Public Health at the University of Utah School of Medicine, talks about the three biggest challenges facing health care, what needs to happen for spending to decrease, and why it matters that all Americans have access.
As health care evolves, nurses will continue to play important roles in patient treatment. Pamela Cipriano, president of the American Nurses Association, speaks about nurses of the future and the growing influence they have. She discusses how education, teamwork, lobbying for reform and assisting baby boomers to lead healthy active lives are just a few of the responsibilities nurses can undertake.
In a perfect world, researchers could mine patient data to view trends that might assist in studies and improve health care overall. Dr. Ross Koppel of the University of Pennsylvania wants to make that data available across health care systems, but says there are hurdles. He argues that the quality and usefulness of health information technology could be improved for the sake of patients and research.
One of the biggest problems scientists face when trying to describe their research is trying to get an enormous amount of information out without dumbing it down or making it inaccurate. Valeri Lantz-Gefroh from the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University is trying to get scientists out of “lecture mode” and into having a conversation. She makes the case for better communication in science and research.