How do we bring about real change? I’m not talking about something small, a 3% increase in the number of patients seen, tied to a 2% decrease in time spent in the waiting room and a 1.5% in profitability. I’m not even talking about bigger numbers that just amplify an already bad situation, like insurance companies falsely trying to use health care reform as a justification for trying to push through 20-40% premium increases. No, I’m looking for something else, something different.

Yeah, this is all driven by my new position as Social Media Manager for Community Health Centers, Inc. Yesterday, I spend sometime touring the New Britain facility with the founder and we talked about social entrepreneurship and trying to bring transformational change. As much as I like the ideas, I tend to shy away from them as big buzz words whose meaning too often gets lost or diluted.

When I went through orientation on Wednesday, there were several computer based training courses that I needed to take. First on the list was providing culturally diverse health care. It talked about the difficulties of providing health care to people from different cultural backgrounds. There was a section on using medical translators. Another talked about the stereotypical assumptions both patients and doctors might make. Key to this was to try and avoid assumptions and actions that would impede the flow of information. A good doctor needs to have the full story to understand and recommend the best course of treatment. She needs to communicate it in such a way that the patient is most likely to follow the course of treatment.

All of this came back to mind last night as I read John Sealander’s blog post about a recent doctor’s appointment. He started off with this image:

He then went on to talk about what he did not tell his doctor. After the training sessions this week, I would probably, have said something like, “I’m sorry. I was trying to schedule an appointment with a doctor that cares about patients,” and then left.

Yeah, that might be a bit too blunt and confrontational, but I really believe that we need to make major changes to health care and other aspects of our society. Some of this is around changing attitudes around health care, who is assumed to know what, how we treat other people, assumptions about who second class citizens are, etc. There is a lot that needs to be unpacked in all of this, but I need to get going with the rest of my day