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NARATH'S BLOG

Giving Thanks

I want to share what I consider a treasured reminder of the humanity within the sometimes gruelling practice of medicine.

A few years ago, I was part of a team in Africa that developed an open-source system that notifies doctors of critical lab results within their hospitals. We developed this system to support bi-directional group based and closed loop communication. This work leapfrogs the system that we had been using in one of the best hospitals in the US. When I returned, I wondered why we still used the system we had. With some wonderful mentors, we studied this in our article - “Why do we still page each other?”.

In doing this work, I also ended up doing a word frequency analysis of the messages from all of the pages that had taken place in my hospital over a month, and was very surprised and touched when it showed this.

Word Cloud of paging analysis - the most frequent word is thanks

As one of the clinicians on the receiving end of these pages, I would never have guessed this. It showed me how human the communication was even when its main purpose is supposed to be critical results and action. It moved me so much that I have it printed on a canvas on my wall and inspired me to write the poem below. During this dark time of COVID, while society is suffering and healthcare workers are continually called on during crisis, this image and the resulting poem help to ground me in the deep humanity of what we do. I hope they are of some comfort to you too.

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