Why the Contextual aspect of Health Care can Save Lives and Money

With all the technology around today, doctors still often fail to make the right diagnosis.  Usually not due to any failure of knowledge or smarts, but because diagnostics is often as much art as science.

As such, it requires an almost intuitive and/or subtle understanding of the patient, his or her circumstances and sometimes it’s as much about what is not said by the patient, as that which is voiced.

Drs. Saul Weiner and Alan Schwartz have taken these ideas to the next step in their research about art of context and diagnostics.  Their work is revealed in Listening for What Matters: Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care.

My conversation with Dr. Saul Weiner and Dr. Alan Schwartz