Lack of Creativity in the Medical Profession

¶ … intended public audience for this opinion piece includes stakeholders in the healthcare industry, including educators, researchers, nurses, physicians, and hospital administrators. One of the goals of this opinion piece is to persuade members of the healthcare industry to embrace a new paradigm in which creative thought is welcomed and encouraged, rather than shunned and mistrusted as it currently is. Consumers who are willing to pressure their physicians to improve quality of care are also a primary target demographic, as all Americans will at some point in their lives avail themselves of medical services. All Americans are likely to have had, at some point or another, a negative experience using medical services. Therefore, my goal is to persuade the audience of consumers to demand a higher standard of care.

The popular television show House helped draw attention to the need for, and resistance to, creativity in the medical practice. A lack of creativity in the medical field has been detracting from quality of patient care, as physicians have become "slavish ... to standardized treatments," and their decisions have become "increasingly determined by mechanical and algorithmic processes," (Jones 1). An assessment published in the Harvard Business Review accuses medicine of being "chaotic, expensive, inefficient, and often ineffective," (Morse 1). Medicine is not just any business in need of innovation to bolster profitability; it is a field in which quality of care means life or death. As Jones points out, practicing medicine without any creativity "can do more harm than good," (Jones 1). Therefore, medical schools need to start altering their admissions procedures, changing the way medicine is taught, and training doctors to be creative as well as critical thinkers. Hospital administrators and medical review boards likewise need to inject a healthy dose of creativity into the medical profession by hiring doctors who think outside the box, instead of favoring only those who remain safely within the confines of limited thinking. Moreover, health care institutions themselves need to take a more innovative approach to the ways services are promoted, delivered, and offered to patients in order to create the most robust medical system possible.

Resistance to creativity in the medical profession begins at the earliest possible point: medical school. Rojahn points out, "those likely to see (or at least attempt to see) connections between disparate subject areas are likely to be weeded out in the medical school application process," (Rojahn 1). Dissatisfied and dismayed with what they have experienced in medical school training, an increasing number of researchers, scientists, and physicians are using new media vehicles like the creativity-driven TED talks to stimulate discussions about how to promote a more innovative medical profession. By embracing creative thinkers at a young age, the medical fields can draw the best and brightest instead of losing top thinkers to alternative fields.

The problem with lack of creativity in medicine continues immediately after graduating from medical school. Idealism and enthusiasm for the field quickly fades into the reality of a profit-driven, creatively stagnant field. A case study can best illustrate what happens when young doctors eager to provide top quality care for their patients are cut down by a system that prefers a robotic approach to medicine. When Jay Parkinson graduated medical school and established his first private practice, he opted for an innovative business model used by few to no other physicians in the United States. He decided to establish his practice almost entirely online and based on house calls: an idea that brought his website 7 million hits in the first month alone (Parkinson). Using his streamlined business model and reducing overhead costs to only 10% of his operational budget, Parkinson set out to revolutionize the medical practice.

What should have been a catalyst for other doctors on the market to follow instead became a fiasco highlighting the problems that besiege the profession. A barrage of "haters" within the medical profession itself started to hound Parkinson. Writing about his experience, Parkinson states, "I need to point out that I never once received any criticism from patients or the general public. The only criticism I've ever received came from within the medical community." Those "haters" pushed the New York State Office of Professional Conduct to investigate and even though the board found no wrongdoing, Parkinson had become too ostracized from his colleagues to make his revolutionary business model work. Patients thereby lost one of the only opportunities they had to receive care in the way they want it, rather than in the way the paternalistic medical establishment wants to deliver it.

The American Medical Association (AMA) itself admits "responsibilities are honored when physicians enhance their own practices by expanding the range of techniques and interventions they offer to patients." Then why is the AMA so hesitant to promote innovation, creativity, and change? The "barriers to innovation" that Morse cites in the Harvard Business Review are neither threatening to patients nor to medical professionals. They include simple shifts in practice (such as checklists to ensure doctors are following evidence-based practice in order to minimize medical error), shifting to electronic medical records, streamlining payment systems, offering the kinds of "virtual visits" that Parkinson had been trying to do, and including cutting-edge medical techniques and technologies into the list of patient options (Morse 1).

The cutting edge techniques and technologies like stem cells and other regenerative medicines, robotic and remote surgeries, and genetics are already available in other countries, driving a large patient cohort towards the burgeoning medical tourism industry. As a result, many patients are sacrificing the relationships they could be building with their primary care physician at home for unknown doctors in foreign countries. The quality of care in those foreign countries might be every bit as good as it is in the United States, but there are also concerns about hygiene and infection that might cause more problems than the patient had bargained for; in general medical tourism is a gamble. Instead of driving business abroad, more healthcare institutions in the United States should be embracing cutting edge techniques. The lack of creativity in the American medical profession might ultimately lead to a dangerous brain drain, in which we lose our top talent to countries more supportive of their vision.