F023 Patient centricity: music for patients, time for doctors (Walter Werzova, Klaus Laczika…
If you’ve ever been to an ICU, you might know it can quickly remind of a war zone: alarms beeping, and the unpleasant sense of death and helplessness lurking around heavily wounded and weak patients.
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In the last decade, healthcare has started moving to value-based care and so-called patient-centricity. Patients are increasingly seen as customers, that don’t just receive information and treatment but instead take an active part in it.
In the broadest possible sense, patient centricity is a mental shift from WHAT is done for the patient in the healthcare system, to HOW things are done. The HOW may include the used technology but also includes the environment.
The sound of music
A decade ago, prof. dr. Klaus Laczika — an Austrian specialist in Emergency Medicine, Anaesthetics and Pediatrics, got an instruction from his boss: “you studied music,” the supervisor said, “use it in the ICU.”
That’s how dr. Laczika began researching the healing potential of music in the ward.
In parallel, Walter Werzowa — Austrian composer, producer, and owner of LA-based music production studio Musikvergnuegen, was doing a similar thing in UCLA in Los Angeles. They quickly connected in their shared effort to improve patient stay and the hospital environment.
“We know that patients from the ICU suffer from PTSD after discharge, and we know the psychological effect is a consequence of hospitalization,” says Laczika.
At first glance, music may be perceived as an unproven healing method. However, the clinical results are positive. “This is a similar story as we saw with acupuncture, which wasn’t taken seriously by Western medicine at first,” says Werzowa. He created Health Tunes — a streaming audio service designed to improve one’s physical and mental health. Based on a patient’s condition, HealthTunes offers specific music and sound therapies, which reference evidence-based clinical research. The service is completely free.
As explained by Werzowa, his motivated to create this from a humanistic point of view, because he dreams of universal access to care and the world where we could reduce healthcare costs to zero.
The next indispensable piece of equipment in hospitals will have to be earphones.
The environment for the patients, but what about the doctors
Music is just one creative approach to improve hospital stays and speed of healing. The next one is architecture, lighting and the whole design of healthcare institutions. At the same time, a nice environment means nothing without the right communication and attitude between doctors and patients. Patients need and expect empathy and kindness in their most vulnerable times, however, if doctors are overburdened with technology, scientific progress and performance requests, they can quickly run out of resources to deliver the nicest possible care.
Denise Silber
Many things need to be addressed to improve this: provide doctors with time, include patients in the discussion about improved care, and think out of the box about how care could and should be delivered.
Denise Silber, the founder-president of Basil Strategies and of the Doctors 2.0 & You conference series, has a deep vision and understanding of the opportunities and challenges of digital health with 20+ years of experience. She observed the transformation from paternalistic to partnership attitude between patients and doctors first hand, and continues to contribute to it’s improvement by working with medical congresses and creating a space for debates between patients and doctors. how to raise the patient-includedness in the healthcare system.
Raquel Correia, a Paris based MD, looks optimistically at new technologies and promises of automatization, which would give doctors time to do what they went into medicine for in the first place — treating patients instead of “fighting the printers and IT systems”.
Some questions addressed in the podcast:
How does music therapy in a hospital look like?
What does the research show? What kind of music do patients prefer?
Will music become a wider clinical practice?
What is the current state of the patient-doctor relationship?
How can we prevent doctor burn-out with technology?