Friday 7 November 2008

Healthcare in 7 minutes?

General practitioners (GPs) and family doctors have on average about seven minutes for the consultation with each patient who visits them, within the National Health Service (NHS) of the United Kingdom.  These GPs are increasingly being offered more technology support in their work, more complex drugs to prescribe, and more options for followup treatments.  The future vision for healthcare often points towards more individual care, more targeted prescriptions and drugs for each patient.  Biotechnology marches on towards such a vision.  It is difficult to align these two things.  It is difficult to see how even the best doctors will cope with an even more complex world with so little time available to them.  I wonder if more intelligent pre-briefing of patient records will even scratch the surface in respect of making their task any easier.

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