3 Questions for HiSum Speaker Jordan Shlain

This post will be the first in a series of posts profiling speakers for our upcoming Health Innovation Summit.  

Dr. Jordan Shlain is the founder of Current Health and HealthLoop.  He founded Current Health in 1997 because he wanted to run a medical practice that put priority on the doctor-patient relationship and provided convenient, same-day home medical visits. He is an assistant clinical professor at the UCSF Medical Center and a medical economics lecturer at UC Berkeley. Dr. Shlain also serves on the board of directors for the San Francisco Medical Society.

What are the most important qualities of a strong patient-physican relationship?
Trust and mutual mindfulness.  Physicans who can get out of themselves and put them in the ‘place’ of a patient and anticipate and understand where the patient is will connect much better.  Most of this involves listening, giving patients options and letting them know that whatever plan is pursued, the doctor will be there to guide them.  What do you do in your practice to ensure these qualities are protected?  We make sure our staff and our doctors are always in the mode of ‘anticipating’ and trying to make the entire experience (both administrative and clinical) easy.  We also use Healthloop which is a clinical tethering technology.

What types of digital health products or services do you recommend for primary care physicians to integrate into their practice to connect with their patients or create more time with patients?
The good news is that there are number of digital health products coming on line but often they do not integrate into workflow.  I’m at a ‘wait and see’ moment when it comes to video visits – sadly, aside from PHR’s which are still very primitive, there just are not many applications that make it easy to implement and have a model that doesn’t create more work.

What are the biggest challenges ahead for primary care physicians?
Care coordination.

Hear more from Jordan Shlain, along with Tom Lee of One Medical and Abbe Don of Ideo on their panel, Healthcare Delivery Redelivered, at Health Innovation Summit later this month.