Mark Sorensen is an MD whose HIPUS system is the focus of THE HIPUS® REVOLUTION: How Smarter Healthcare IT Can Save Doctors―and Their Patients, a book designed to draw attention to the problem of burnout among physicians and Sorensen’s IT-oriented solution to it. Sorensen’s background is in emergency medicine (EM), an area of the healthcare sector that is particularly affected by burnout. Early on, Sorensen notes that, according to a recent survey, 60% of all EM physicians are burnt out. As such conditions can obviously lead to all sorts of complications in the treatment of patients, Sorensen sought to alleviate these problems by resorting to IT. The importance of diagnosis is at the heart of the book. Sorensen points out that diagnostic expertise is central to medicine and to EM in particular, and that many doctors, educated “by a process that hasn’t changed much in a hundred years,” are missing out on crucial lessons in effective information management and decision-making tools. CME (continuing medical education, a long-established ideal in the field) also buckles under the weight of a medical literature that, according to Sorensen, doubles in size every 73 days on average.
Sorensen’s determination of the problems assailing EM is the most persuasive part of the book. Sorensen brings a great deal of quantitative data to support his argument, and the anecdotal material (Sorensen has worked in no fewer than twenty-six EDs across the United States) is shocking. It depicts nurses doing the jobs of doctors, directors continuing to oversee dysfunctional EDs for the sake of their pensions, and patients’ symptoms being overlooked on the basis of prior behaviors. Sorensen’s writing style is straightforward and humble; he is quick to own up to his own failures in diagnosis, many of which must have been heart-breaking to deal with. He also writes compellingly, at times movingly, on the travails of physicians burdened by overwork—updating difficult-to-navigate electronic health records using systems that produce “note bloat” almost by design, and astronomically high college tuition fees.
Sorensen’s solution is his HIPUS system, which uses Bayesian analysis to increase accurate diagnosis rates, a technique pioneered by British surgeon Tim de Dombal (and others) in the 1970s. The technique is well known, but its mathematical complexity makes it hard to use on the spot. Sorensen’s innovation is to incorporate it into IT, using a color-coded system with which to indicate the relative importance of each test, X-ray, or examination.
As the originator of HIPUS, Sorensen is hardly a disinterested party; medical practitioners are encouraged to see how the system would work for themselves. The book also gets lost in the weeds a little in later chapters, when the remit expands from smarter IT (as noted in the book’s subtitle) to calls for better doctor-nurse relationships and a well-constructed attack on profiteering in healthcare (as well as the uneven care quality that tends to go with it). However, THE HIPUS REVOLUTION is a book that deserves reading; Sorensen’s ideas are strong, and his passion for his work invigorating.
Dr. Mark Sorensen’s THE HIPUS® REVOLUTION: How Smarter Healthcare IT Can Save Doctors―and Their Patients is more wide-ranging than the title and subtitle suggest, but it also contains lots of cogent analysis of the problems assailing emergency medicine in the United States and how to remedy them.
~ Craig Jones for IndieReader