Saul participated in a panel on the Diane Rehm Show focused on Improving Doctor-Patient Communication in a Digital World.

Listen at http://thedianerehmshow.org/audio/#/shows/2016-02-09/improving-doctor-patient-communication-in-a-digital-world/111878/@00:00.

We spent the morning of February 2 live on the air with Geoffrey Riley and Emily Cureton on The Jefferson Exchange on Jefferson Public Radio in Oregon, discussing the book, contextualizing care, and unannounced standardized patients.

You can listen at http://cpa.ds.npr.org/ksor/audio/2016/02/The_Jefferson_Exchange_02_03_2016_Hr2_0.mp3 or use the embedded player here:

There wasn’t time for us to address one of the points brought up by listener Connie, about doctors “locking in” to diagnoses. In the decision making world, we call that “premature closure”, and it’s a reflection of the general human propensity that it’s easy to come to a (first) conclusion than to change your mind. As we discuss in the book, doctors are taught to develop a “differential diagnosis” – a list of additional possible medical explanations for the symptoms – as a way to keep them from focusing solely on what they first believe is most likely; we have written about the additional value of developing a “contextual differential diagnosis” – a list of possible contextual factors that could also be contributing to the patient’s problem.

John Aeillo has reviewed Listening for What Matters for the Electric Review blog. Read the review here:

http://electricrev.net/2016/01/26/listening-for-what-matters/

Saul was interviewed by Raul Gallyot on KWMR’s Airwaves. Listen below…

This week, Alan Schwartz was interviewed by Ian Williams at the Catskill Review of Books about Listening for What Matters, and the New York Times published Alan and Saul’s response to Dr. Robert Wachter’s opinion piece How measurement fails doctors and teachers.

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Saul spoke with Esme Murphy on WCCO Radio CBS Minnesota on January 16, 2016 about contextual error, unannounced standardized patients, and the book.

Saul discusses the relationship between our 4C approach to measuring contextual care and the Instrument for Patient Capacity Assessment (ICAN) from the Mayo Clinic’s Knowledge Evaluation Research Unit on the Minimally Disruptive Medicine blog.

My father called my attention to this week’s Sunday Dilbert cartoon:

It’s probably intended to point out that when we ask a co-worker “How are you?” we’re not really expecting an answer, just an acknowledgment of the question (“Fine”).

But my father, newly sensitized to contextualization of care, saw that the bearded co-worker is pouring out critical life context here — which Dilbert proceeds to ignore.

The flavor is very much like the examples we’ve seen in our recordings of physician-patient encounters in which a patient drops a clear clue that life context may be impacting his/her health, and a physician proceeds blithely to the next item on the checklist on the electronic medical record computer screen. Would you be surprised to learn that Dilbert’s co-worker’s previously well-controlled diabetes has taken a turn for the worse?