What will this workshop help you to do ?

3. What will this workshop help you to do ? • Manage your life better ! • A doctor’s life is very different from a businessman’s or executives • We have our own unique set of problems

4. A doctor needs to wear many hats ! • Clinician , who has polished medical skills • Academician, who is a constant learner • Manager , who understands the business aspects of running a profitable clinic

5. A doctor needs to wear many hats ! • CEO, who understands how to motivate staff and lead people; • Financial expert, who can manage his money • Family provider • Self caretaker, who know how to look after himself and fulfill his personal needs .

6. The problem • Unfortunately, while doctors are quite eager to discuss medicine, most are unwilling to talk about the nuts and bolts of practise management • Don’t want to enrich the competition by giving away their “trade secrets” ! • We can learn together and help each other

7. The solution • There is no need to reinvent the wheel . The challenges are similar all over the world • We can learn from our colleagues and from peers in other parts of the world • Apply knowledge from other fields to ours !

8. Being a doctor today is not easy Do you find that there is: • too much work • too much hassle • too much competition • too much despair; and • too little reimbursement ?

9. Common response – work even harder ! • Run around from clinic to clinic, hospital to hospital • Try to “expand” your practise to get more patients

10. Common response – work even harder ! • Only 24 hours in a day ! • Fed up and unhappy • No time for yourself or your family

12. Are you fed up of… • Long energy-exhausting hours and crushing workloads leaving little or no free time for yourself or your family ? • Demanding dissatisfied patients ? • Inadequate payment for all your hard work ?

13. Need to work smarter – not harder !Need to learn tools which will: • Give you control of your time; • Allow you to do work which you felt was worthwhile, for patients that you enjoy seeing; and • Pay you well for your effort, so that you enjoy going to work every day.

14. Practise management skills • Every doctor is an entrepreneur • Needs to run a business • These skills are never taught in medical college • Some doctors never learn them, and struggle to manage their practise

16. 5 stages of a doctor’s career • Entry, when you are starting out; • Establishment, when you have created a name for yourself; • Exploration, when you look for new fields to conquer; • Specialization , when you settle down in your niche; and • Mastery, when you establish yourself as the Expert in your area of interest.

17. Specialise ! • Need to carve out a niche for yourself • Have a clear professional goal • Shape your practise around your abilities – you will become extremely good at doing what you enjoy !

19. Please PrescribeInformation ! Dr Aniruddha Malpani, MD HELP, Health Education Library for People www.healthlibrary.com

20. Carrot and stick • 1. Promote your practise • Well informed patients are more faithful • Differentiate yourself from other doctors • Good investment ! • Can vouch for this from personal experience ! • 2. Protect you from lawsuits • Document that you have educated your patient

21. Patient autonomy • Autonomy = freedom to decide • Doctors need to • 1. present the options to the patients and • 2. allow patients to choose for themselves • Informed choice means patients need information

22. Allowing patients to choose • With advances in medical therapy, there are often many treatment options available for any medical problem • Do not choose for the patient – how can you read the patient’s mind or foretell the outcome ? • Present the information and let the patient decide

23. Educating patients • Most doctors do not spend much time educating their patients. • This is a shame. The primary role of a doctor should not be merely treating an illness, but rather helping people remain healthy, and educating patients is vitally important for this.

24. Doctor ( docere) = Teacher In ancient India, doctors were paid only if their patients were in good health. If someone fell ill, the doctor’s payments were stopped until he treated the illness successfully. This was a very useful model, which should be more widely practised!

25. Barriers - 1 • Most of us do not have the time to encourage questions from patients. • Most doctors are just not very good at communicating with their patients. •  Doctors are used to talking medicalese

26. Barriers - 2 • Educating the patient is simply not valued enough • It is not seen to be glamorous • It is not financially rewarding. • It can be quite boring to repeat the same stuff again and again.

28. Encourage questions ! • Some doctors feel threatened by a patient’s questions. This is not the right perspective at all. Remember: both doctor and patient have a similar goal – to make the patient better – and questions should be encouraged and answered, rather than leaving doubts to fester – a situation that can create unnecessary problems in the future.

29. Benefits of patient education - 1 • Happier patients , because they have been treated as intelligent adults. • Patient education is important as a practice promoter: patients appreciate that the doctor has taken the time and effort to inform and teach them.

30. Benefits - 2 • Patients forget over half of what the doctor tells them, because of the stress of the consultation. Giving them printed materials to read at home will help prevent midnight calls . • Printed educational materials help to increase patient compliance

31. Benefits - 3 • Patient education helps to improve public health. Educational materials are read by the entire family, and community health awareness can help to reduce quackery . • People respect the printed word – especially when given by the doctor !

32. Best form of CME for the doctor ! • Remember that the inquiring and well-informed patient can teach you much more about medicine than any textbook ! • A patient’s questions will make a good doctor think about things that otherwise he or she might take for granted.

33. Best form of CME for the doctor ! • Help you to improve the quality of your medical practice. The well-informed patient may help make you aware of advances occurring in other parts of the world that you – as a busy doctor – might otherwise overlook.

34. Helps to improve empathy • Reading information intended for the patient can teach you to look at things from the patient’s point of view. This helps to increase your empathy – a very desirable goal.

35. Reduce risk of complications • Patient education can actually reduce the risk of inadvertent complications. After all, doctors are human and may make errors . The well-informed patient can sometimes point out possible problems with a treatment plan that the doctor may have overlooked (for example, patients with G6PD deficiency)

36. Reduce quackery • Educating patients will help prevent health fraud and quackery. If doctors teach their patients about what can be done to help them, as well as the limits of what we can offer them, they are unlikely to be cheated by quacks.

37. Reduce medicolegal risks • Educational handouts offer proof that the doctor has informed the patient of possible complications and risks . Patient education is an integral part of “risk management” in medical practice today, and will reduce the risk of doctors being sued if complications do occur.

38. Patient education – key component of informed consent • Don’t tell the patient what to do • Present the information and the treatment options – and allow them to make up their own mind ! • Empower patients with information – they will respect you for this !

39. Printed brochures • Printed pamphlets form the core of patient education. It’s easy to adapt, modify, translate and print educational leaflets produced elsewhere – don’t waste time reinventing the wheel ! • You can find many examples to copy at HELP ! • Test them on your patients !

41. Printed brochures • Remember that patients have different levels of reading skills • Leave these in your waiting room, so that patients can gainfully use their time while waiting for you

42. Printed brochures • Encourage your patients to take the leaflets and read them at home at leisure – this is a good way to promote your practice as well. • You can also give them the appropriate leaflet at the end of the consultation.

43. Please Prescribe Information ! • All the information in the world can never replace the doctor ! • Information can help you become a better doctor – and also help your patient to become a better patient !

44. Doctor.com Dr Malpani, MD http://www.drmalpani.com

45. Why bother ? • Doctors have practised medicine for many years without the Net • Isn’t this just another new-fangled toy for kids to play with ? • Isn’t the boom over ? • I’m too old to learn !

47. MDConsult.com • Full text of over 30 medical textbooks, medical journals and Clinics of North America • No advertising • Specially discounted price for Indian doctors • Subsciption can be provided by a pharmaceutical company

48. MDConsult.com • For less than Rs 30 per day, you will never need to buy another medical book or journal in your life • Constantly updated all the time • Excellent patient educational information as well, which you can print out for your patients !

49. Get on the Net • Today, it’s not enough to just have a net connection • You need to have your own website ! • Symbolic of how rapidly times are changing !

50. Start your own website ! • Patients are hungry for reliable information • The internet is an excellent source of information, but a lot of this can be wrong and dangerous • Provide reliable information to your patients through your own website • Very cost effective !