Well, let's
Posted By: think about this. on 2009-05-01
In Reply to: How could there be doctor/patient communication issues during a preventative healthcare visit if - - lall
A patient comes to the office. They're given a preventive regimen. They go home. They don't follow the regimen.
More to the point, the idea that preventive care would prove cost effective if only patient-physician communication were improved is extremely simplistic and it fails to understand how healthcare economic studies are conducted. In order to answer such a question, it would be necessary to carefully identify people who do participate (other than simply coming to the office) in the preventive care or else you wind up measuring the wrong thing - in fact, the very thing that you are talking about, such as patient-physician communications.
De facto, communications problems would interfere with the patient's willingness or ability to participate in the regimen provided, and therefore take them out of the group being studied. All you want is to look at people who do actually participate and measure the degree to which the preventive care reduces their future healthcare needs and costs. So far, such studies have not shown the benefit that "logic" (like Obama uses in the earlier quote) would suggest or common folk wisdom would have us believe.
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