Atul Gawande
Atul Gawande
Atul Gawandeis an American surgeon, writer, and public health researcher. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. He is also a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. In public health, he is executive director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and also chairman of Lifebox,...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth5 November 1965
CityBrooklyn, NY
CountryUnited States of America
If the conversation people think is coming is the 'death panel' conversation, that's a total failure.
Writing lets you step back and think through a problem. Even the angriest rant forces the writer to achieve a degree of thoughtfulness.
I think the extreme complexity of medicine has become more than an individual clinician can handle. But not more than teams of clinicians can handle.
Having great components is not enough, and yet we've been obsessed in medicine with components. We want the best drugs, the best technologies, the best specialists, but we don't think too much about how it all comes together.
Don’t let yourself be. Find something new to try, something to change. Count how often it succeeds and how often it doesn’t. Write about it. Ask a patient or a colleague what they think about it. See if you can keep the conversation going.
No one teaches you how to think about money in medical school or residency. Yet, from the moment you start practicing, you must think about it. You must consider what is covered for a patient and what is not.
The vast majority of doctors really do try to take the money out of their minds. But to provide the best possible care requires using resources in a way that keeps you viable but improves the quality of care.
The health-care sector certainly employs more people and more machines than it did. But there have been no great strides in service. In Western Europe, most primary-care practices now use electronic health records and offer after-hours care; in the United States, most don't.
People say that the most expensive piece of medical equipment is the doctor's pen. It's not that we make all the money. It's that we order all the money.
Health care confronts us with a difficult test. We have never corrected failure in something so deeply embedded in people's lives and in the economy without the pressure of an outright crisis.
Doctors quickly learn that how much they make has little to do with how good they are. It largely depends on how they handle the business side of their practice.
Our health-care morass is like the problems of global warming and the national debt - the kind of vast policy failure that is far easier to get into than to get out of. Americans say that they want leaders who will take on these problems.
My vantage point on the world is the operating room where I see my patients.
I was never born to write. I was taught to write. And I am still being taught to write.