Hello, all! Before I get into the meat of this blog, there's a bit of housekeeping to do.
I've blogged in various spaces for a long time--almost the entire time that blogs were a thing, since I was 17 years old, and there was only one time that I blogged about a patient situation. Once. I was a medical student blogging about a patient whose code I participated in when I was a newbie on the wards. That blog no longer exists. At the time, I thought I didn't reveal any PHI (protected health information), but that's a slippery slope.
For example, you may not state the name or age of the patient, but once you reveal gender and what the main medical problem was related to the code situation, you've partially identified the patient and cannot guarantee, especially on the web, that you have not violated HIPAA.
For those unfamiliar with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, read on here, or for a longer explanation, here.
We physicians are all familiar with our de-identified battle stories we tell each other (and often, our significant others) after a long day's work or a hard weekend call. We walk the line too often, the accounts of our patient interactions released into the air and lost in space.
This will not be the place for that.
Since writing about that one patient's code, I have made it a practice not to write about patients, not even de-identified or with aliases, not even in my own personal, off-line journal. If it is not essential to patient care and it is not in a secure, encrypted space, I'm not writing about it. Sure, my patient care space is rich with stories and anecdotes, both heartwarming and heartbreaking, hilarious and infuriating. However, my responsibility to my patients is greater than any creative desire I have in recording our interactions.
As health care providers, we are privileged to be invited into the intimate spaces in which our patients' allow us. We honor that privilege by upholding their privacy. Only as medically necessary for their care does anything revealed by them, in their stories or on their bodies, leave that exam room. As a writer, I've never lamented the tales that I let expire behind the doors of my clinic or within the walls of the hospital. It is a covenant between my patients and me. "You can share with me anything. That's what I'm here for. I'm your doctor."
So, you will not find the following in this blog:
1) Patient stories - no aliases, no re-identified accounts. I will not be soliciting patient permission to publish anything, either. This is not the purpose of this blog.
2) Patient-specific medical scenarios or cases - I hope some of my content is educational, but this is also not the place where I will be creating patient scenarios. "Mr. So-in-so is a 36-year-old..." nope. I have done this for medical presentations before, creating a amalgamated patient from my experiences, but ultimately it ends up being close to an actual patient of mine, and no.
As such, for any comments, same thing. Do not share any PHI with me on this blog. Do not email me PHI. Let's respect our patients.
So, what else does a doctor have to talk about? Plenty! Read on!