Where is my doctor?
I learned of a worrying trend this weekend. A professor at the Yale Medical School told me that five years ago, 55% of the graduating class were internists. This year, the number was 14%. There has been a natural trend toward physician specialization over the last century as medicine has become more complex and the ever-broadening spectrum of care cannot be provided by any single physician. But this precipitous drop is indicative of more immediate problem: that compensation for specialist physicians so far outweighs that of primary care physicians that students are unwilling to follow the path of primary care
However possible, it is essential that the country create incentives for students to return to internal medicine.
But if this trend continues, it will create new informatics challenges as no single physician will have the reigns of a patient’s healthcare. New physicians seeing the patient on a one-off basis will have to research the patient history from scratch in order to diagnose the day’s problem. This will come in the form of tools to better analyze the patient, and better capture and aggregate information to support this communal model of care by committee.