AI will transform primary care! AI does better diagnostics than doctors! Patients like AI responses to their portal messages better than their doctors’ messages! Providers save hours a day in charting with the help of AI scribes! Lots of hype. What’s real? I haven’t engaged in AI yet in my doctoring, so I have suspended…
Heartland Alliance Health – the federally qualified health center where I have worked for the past 8 years, that has provided healthcare for the homeless and people living with HIV in Chicago– announced this week that we will be closing in the next two months. I have worked with HAH since February of 2017, and…
Recently I completed a citizenship exam exemption form for an Iraqi patient. She was shattered. Completely shattered. Unable to clean or cook, shop or bank. Lost in time and place. What city did she live in? America. What season is it? Summer, as snow fell outside. Her husband had given up his job to care…
Years ago, for a writing class assignment, I began a list to tell a story. My list was modeled after Sei Shonogun’s list “Hateful Things” from her tenth-century classic The Pillow Book. She listed everything she hated about being a lady-in-waiting to the Japanese empress circa 966-1017. I listed everything I hated about working as…
This has been a time of transitions. New baby new home new job. New possibilities for life. New take on how to support life. After eight years with the Chicago Family Health Center and teaching students at University of Chicago, my first roles as a physician out of residency, I took on a new challenge…
These haikus are from the seven students on the Summer Service Partnership’s Team South Chicago. A medical student, social work student and undergraduate from the University of Chicago partner with four high school students from Chicago’s South Sude to learn about the social determinants of health, volunteer with community organizations, and develop a health service…
“Blessed. I’m so blessed.” She kept repeating this, from her seat on the examining table. “I’m so blessed.” I unwrapped the bandage holding on the splint that had covered her arm for the three weeks since the bullet went in above her elbow and came out through her forearm, hitting no bone, touching no major…
The snow is falling in Chicago. Potentially 11 inches in the next few days, which means only one thing–cross country skiing! I’m warm, wrapped under a blanket on the couch curled up next to a napping husband. My stomach is full, after two pieces of my mom’s delicious holiday cranberry-orange nut bread (thank you, Mom).…
Today a group of community physicians were discussing ACEs (accountable care entities), and exploring their payment structures. Healthcare plans being paid a set amount for taking care of a person within a set population, with incentives to keep them healthy. Fee-for-value vs fee-for-service. Value vs volume. What do we mean by value and volume, when…
Rishi Manchanda is a healthcare not sickcare visionary. He founded HealthBegins, a group to train doctors to become proverbial upstreamists–a term he describes in his TED talk and book, The Upstream Doctors. The upstream proverb: Imagine a river, heading towards rapids, towards a deadly waterfall. In the water are children. At risk of death. Three friends leap to…
Prevention Not Prescription 