Bedside Manners – Doctor Tells Patient He is Terminal Through Video Robot – IOTW Report

Bedside Manners – Doctor Tells Patient He is Terminal Through Video Robot

Friday, 8 March 2019, 13:36 BFH Uncategorized 27

Fox–

When Ernest Quintana went into Kaiser Permanente Medical Center‘s emergency department in Fremont on Sunday, his wife of 58 years, his son, daughter and  granddaughter all worried about the 79-year-old man.

They say it was hard enough to learn that his lungs were failing, but they couldn’t believe it when a hospital robot entered his room and they got the news through a doctor on the robot’s video screen.

“The nurse came around and said the doctor was going to make rounds and I thought ‘OK, no big deal, I’m here,’ ” said Annalisia Wilharm.

A short time later, a robot arrived in the room. A doctor appeared on a video screen. Wilharm took cell phone video so she could show her mother and grandmother the test results.

 

“When I took the video, I didn’t realize all of this was going to unfold,” she said.

Over the robot’s video screen, Wilharm says she and her grandfather learned that Quintana’s lungs were failing and he did not have long to live.

“You might not make it home,” the doctor said on the screen.

Wilharm says that heartbreaking news hurt even more, delivered through a machine.

“Devastated. I was going to lose my grandfather. We knew that this was coming and that he was very sick. But I don’t think somebody should get the news delivered that way. It should have been a human being come in,” Wilharm  said.

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ht/ js

 

27 Comments on Bedside Manners – Doctor Tells Patient He is Terminal Through Video Robot

  4. The VA clinic and hospital where I get treatment are all VERY good, and the doctors and nurses are kind and excellent. I guess I’m lucky. It’s hard to square my VA experiences with the bad ones you hear about.

    What do you want to bet that doctor is a demoncrap?

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  6. The doctor should be disciplined! Delivering diagnosis via video should only be done for non-life-threatening and non-life-changing conditions, or perhaps in case that the patient is highly contagious.

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  7. Cold hearted. But this is better than what the democrats are fighting for. Was the doctor calling from India? Sounded like the guys in the background said something about being from Microsoft and offering to repair computers.

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  9. Gladys- You’re very lucky.
    In Las Vegas, my dad was left sitting in a waiting room at the VA for 3 or 4 hours- and finally a nurse came by to tell him the doctor already went home. It happened TWICE last year.

    He was waiting on prescriptions. He HAD to be there or they wouldn’t renew them. LOL.
    Ain’t that some shit?

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  13. Couple of years ago my 93-yr.-old father in law was on life support for about half a day during his last illness (he passed away while on life support so the family did not have to make a decision) but it was on the weekend and the ER doctor told us he was the only doctor in the hospital so they also use something they call “Doc in a box.” I can’t recall all about it but isn’t that just unbelievable. He said they can’t afford a night doctor on weekends for the regular hospital patients. It was a smallish hospital in Michigan.

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  15. …the doctor was just punching a clock here, making it official. Many docs don’t want to get involved, but they have to do stuff because them’s the rules, and that’s all he was doing here.

    …just to illustrate how jacked up this can be, there was one time my squad got called to a motorcycle accident on the highway. These are always nasty, but that night was kind of special. In this case, a guy had gotten tanked at the club (bad), went riding home alone (very bad), and didn’t have his generator working properly according to his bros, so his lights weren’t very bright on a very dark late night (Super bad).

    The truck that hit him probably didn’t kill him, but the 5 cars that ran over him as he lay in the left lane most certainly did. This fellow was scattered for a quarter-mile up the super slam, and I mean scattered. It was basically a hazmat incident as we shut down the highway and went thither and yon with flashlights in the dark, trying to assemble a complete human being, as in “here’s a boot…OH, there’s some foot in it too” kind of stuff. And since it was a fatal accident, procedures had to be followed including circling each part with paint before picking it up. The highway looked like it had a bad case of measles the next morning.

    we finally gathered all we could find into several convenient bags and went back to the house, as municipal ambulances usually don’t transport dead people. In this case, however, the Democrat coroner who was too lazy to show up at the scene was also too lazy to send a private ambulance or any of his vehicles, so we got to take our erstwhile motorcyclist down to the morgue as he instructed.

    On arrival, the morgue attendant asked us what we had. We told him, and he said “cool, let me look”. He peeked in the first of our collection of fluid containment bags and asked to see our paperwork. He riffled through it for a moment, then announced, “I can’t take him. He’s not dead.”. We obviously questioned this, and were told that we had to go to a hospital and have a doctor DECLARE him dead, in writing, or carry him back home with us and make him a mascot. Having learned a lesson in post-mortem paperwork, we made a short journey to the university hospital and flushed an ER doc out long enough to look at our squelching, and now somewhat whiffy, load and put the signature to bookend this mans life formally, then back to Peter Lorre we went, this time to make a deposit for reals.

    …In short. the system is set up so docs are required to do certain things. This guy was just checking a box.

    Postscript on our motorcycle guy…

    I say we “gathered all we could find”, but we didn’t find EVERYTHING. We were informed about this in the glimmer of dawn by the coroner’s office, who evidently have someone doing the second-worst job I ever heard of where he had to puzzle this person back together into a more or less complete corpse, and failed by some pieces. We sent a crew out to beat the bushes again, but started having folks stopping by the municipal complex to tell us and the police that they had heard about it on the news and went through that area, but didn’t think what they hit was human at the time, so didn’t worry about it until the news. Under cars and in grills, then, we found enough to satisfy Igor down at the morgue.

    Someone’s gotta do it, I suppose…

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  18. It’s the physicians cowardly way out. I never did like Kaiser, they always had a bad reputation for medical care. I had my daughter at Kaiser, I asked about general anesthesia for the birth, they said no anesthesia, you’re having the baby the natural way. WTF! I had no more babies after that.

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  21. First of all, this news could have been just as awful, coming from this particular doctor, in person. Second, last fall I worked a travel assignment in the Emergency Room of a small, rural hospital. They have a “Teledoc” system that works well and is very beneficial for patients and staff. Small hospitals simply cannot afford the resources of larger institutions, so, to be able to access a neurologist in real time, during a stroke for instance, is pretty cool. How it was implemented where I worked: Teledoc is called as soon as there’s a suspicion that patient has “X” diagnos. The call can even be made after an ambulance report, prior to the patients arrival to the facility. The COW, computer on wheels, then goes with the patient to CT where the MD on the screen can watch the scan live. Once the Robo MD has been able to assess and gather information from the patient and/or family, they politely inform the patient that they will review the diagnostic results and discuss their case with the ER provider, then they sign off the COW and talk to the ER doc on the phone. Results, diagnosis, plan of care, etc, are discussed, IN PERSON, at the bedside, by the ER provider.
    This is a good use of the technology. The problem, as I see it, is that everything meant for good usually becomes corrupted by incompetence, laziness, bean counters, etc. I will be sad, but not surprised for this family’s experience to become the norm one day soon as healthcare becomes more, “Free.”

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