"Listening Is A Lost Art In Medicine. Here’s How To Rediscover It" - Prabhjot Singh, MD and Niyum Gandhi
Clinicians and health system leaders started tuning out the patient’s voice, turning instead to electronic health records and the latest protocols to manage their most complicated and high-need patients. Prabhjot Singh, MD, PhD, director of The Arnhold Institute for Global Health and chair in the health system design and global health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Niyum Gandhi, executive vice president and chief population health officer at the Mount Sinai Health System, believe it’s time for an urgent and strategic reset. The factors that lead people to become our nation’s costliest are complex. But they call for, at the start, the simplest intervention: listening. According to the National Academy of Medicine, high-need individuals are disproportionately older, female, white, and less educated. They are also more likely to be publicly insured, have fair-to-poor self-reported health, and be susceptible to lack of coordination within the health care system. Over the past several years at the Mount Sinai Health System, we have focused on developing a new generation of clinical services for high-need patients by drawing heavily on strategies pioneered by others across the nation, guided by recommendations in the newly release NAM report, developed by Dr. Singh. In a fast-paced health care system, it is clear that patients will benefit from the work of researchers and technologists focused on data-driven technologies to improve care. However, the clinical insights and strategies these technologies can give rise to are most useful when they’re incorporated into clinical care by providers who listen carefully to their patients, their colleagues, and the exemplary organizations around them.
- Prabhjot Singh, MD, PhD, Director, Arnhold Institute for Global Health, Chair, Department of Health System Design and Global Health, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
- Niyum Gandhi, Executive Vice President, Chief Population Health Officer, Mount Sinai Health System
