My thanks to the many readers who have contributed to my daughter Emma’s fund-raising effort for pancreatic cancer research. My February diagnosis (neuroendocrine pancreatic cancer) has made the cause quite personal. The breadth and depth of your support for our family has been been humbling.

For anyone interested in contributing — even nominally — to a worthy non-profit organization (the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network), there’s still plenty of time. Because she lives in the San Francisco Bay area, Emma is promoting a specific upcoming event, Purple Stride San Francisco 2015 — a 5K family run/walk in San Francisco on May 31. But to join “Team Willis” — Willis is Emma’s longstanding nickname for me — you don’t have to be a runner or, for that matter, anywhere near San Francisco now, on May 31, or ever. Just go to this site and click on “Donate Now.”

Now, Back to Our Story

After my series of posts about dysfunction within the American medical system, it’s worth pausing to reflect on its positive attributes.

Foremost are the professionals dedicated to patient care. The best of the best are willing to take command of challenging health situations, as mine surely is. They utilize their formidable talents to achieve the best possible outcomes. I was fortunate to have several of these individuals working diligently to save my life. Now they’re trying to improve it.

Like most health care workers, these doctors entered the profession with a clear purpose: to do good. Many also began their careers when the medical care delivery system looked much different from its current configuration. Physicians had more influence over hospital policies. Indeed, doctors ran many more hospitals than they do today. Primary care doctors visited their in-patients daily. Continuing relationships and direct contact with patients helped make the physician’s job rewarding.

A Loss of Personal Mission

As it has evolved in recent years, the medical delivery system has destroyed aspects of this physician-patient relationship. Many experienced doctors have lost their feeling of connectedness with patients. That’s a shame because without a vested stake, the doctor who is able to distance himself from a patient has sacrificed an important part of the personal motivation that makes him or her most effective.

Once a physician views a patient as an abstraction who parades through the system as a collection of conditions, symptoms, and test result numbers to be dealt with — and then moved along to make room for the next patient — the medical profession loses a piece of what makes it a profession. There is nothing conscious or even unique about this phenomenon. It’s human nature for people to care more about what they’re doing if they feel a sense of personal commitment to and responsibility for the outcome.

It’s Not Just Doctors, It’s People

Drawing from my own profession — the law — the most effective senior attorneys give young lawyers working on discrete pieces of a large case a sense of how the individual parts relate to the whole. Even better than that, providing a young lawyer with the opportunity to work directly with clients is the ultimate motivator.

As with older lawyers, senior physicians entered their profession in large part because of they wanted to help individuals. A personal connection to patients was important to that process. Many younger doctors — like their modern attorney contemporaries — have grown up in a different environment, namely, a culture of metrics, numbers, and protocols. In that culture, the physician-patient connection takes a back seat to a relatively new concept: medical worker productivity.

Here’s one example. An earlier post in this series discussed how my blood draws occurred at times times that were not only unrelated to patient care, but also undermined it by disrupting sleep at 4:00 am. As it turns out, that particular situation might actually be worse than I thought.

Recently, one hospital worker told me that blood draws in his hospital (not where I stayed) are timed so that all patients can be completed before a pre-determined deadline. That per-patient time limit makes some phlebotomists worry about taking too long, incentivizes them to rush, and causes the needle to miss a patient’s vein on the first attempt. It is the opposite of a patient-centered medical protocol. The alternative: hire more staff and abolish the time limit. But that would add expense and reduce the hospital’s bottom line. My guess is that the timed blood draw rule is not unique.

The current culture has resulted from non-medical personnel imposing rules in the quest for greater efficiency, as any profit-maximizing business does. But medicine and law are supposed to be different. All too often, rules pursuing efficiency and profit (even in a non-profit medical organization) ignore the impact on patient experiences and outcomes.

Myopic Metrics

The business-oriented world of metrics can’t capture the value of things that are not easily measured. Connectedness between physician and patient is one such immeasurable value that has a big impact on patient experiences and outcomes. It also has an effect — not subject to measurement or a metric — on a physician’s motivation and job satisfaction.

That’s what I’ve learned from my contrasting experiences in a single highly-regarded medical center. Once I got past the barriers that I’ve discussed — the hospitalist wall, a myopic focus on numbers, treating individual symptoms rather than viewing my entire situation holistically — I reached doctors who became connected to me. They felt it, and so did I. As a result, we all benefited.

Technology That Saves Lives

A second feature of American medicine that makes it among the best in the world is its technology. The diagnostic and treatment devices that my doctors have used are staggering in their complexity. (They’re expensive, too.) What has evolved into my positive prognosis (relatively speaking) is a consequence of that technology.

The ongoing challenge is to devise a way to preserve the best aspects of American medicine while eliminating its deeply troubling features. I don’t know how the necessary changes will happen. But as I’ve written with respect to a similar devolution of the legal profession — law schools’ undue reliance on U.S. News rankings and law firms’ preoccupation with short-term profits metrics as definitive indicators of success — the first step is exposing the problems.

A U.S. Supreme Court justice’s observation from long ago still rings true: “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” In law and in medicine, many talented and compassionate people are using remarkable technological advances to do a superb job. But in both professions, we can do a lot better.

Maybe the book that Emma and I have begun to write about my 43-day hospital experience will help. Based upon the overwhelming reader reaction to this series so far, there’s an audience for it — that’s for sure.