Medical Error And Miscommunication

You may be asking yourself if better communication would in fact decrease the number of deaths per year or more importantly, what can we do to ensure more effective communication? Throughout the years, death by medical error and miscommunication has indeed become more recognized and many new tools have been implemented to help decrease the statistics of deaths per year via medical error. Many people in healthcare who have seen so many preventable deaths happen have come up with programs that have changed the very fabric of communication between doctor and patient. A computer program was created in which documents would first be scanned through a computer software, while being scanned the program would change medical lingo to words and phrases

This is a real thing that is happening in the United States, and we can’t keep ignoring it. Effective communication relies on both individuals being good listeners and good communicators, it is a two-way street that many people fail to realize is essential to follow to get the best medical care. Both doctors and patients need to realize their roles in the interaction and do whatever possible to make sure communication is effective and comprehensible, whether it be dulling the terminology down to a scale that people with no medical literacy can understand, or the patient asking more questions or better explanations from their doctor; the medical community and regular citizens need to come together and create solutions on how we can decrease these tremendously high number of deaths per year. It has been proven that better communication and implementing programs which personalize medical discharge documents as well as having documents scanned and re-written in terms that people without medical literacy can understand bring readmission rates in hospitals down 30%. Decreasing readmission rates are a factor in this that is crucial to the health of patients, which leads to less people having complications that lead to