"Second Trope and Go": Dr. Jeremy Faust on the Language of the Handoff

[instrumental music] Ruby.

[upbeat music] Welcome back to The Blind Spot.

I'm Dr. Aditi Nerurkar, your host.

[upbeat music] Your typical clinic day looks something like this: You see a patient, you have them follow up with you in a few weeks or months, and everything goes according to plan.

But then you see that one patient that needs urgent attention in the ER.

Now what? You need to convey your concerns and your sense of urgency to a provider who has likely never met your patient.

That's the art of a good patient handoff, but it can be riddled with so many blind spots.

When we talk about handoffs, we tend to think about documentation, the expect note, the discharge summary, the referral letter.

Those things matter, but they're not the whole story.

How do we avoid the blind spots in this tricky art of the handoff? Our guest today is the perfect person to ask.

Dr. Jeremy Faust has spent much of his career inside the most handoff-dense environment in medicine, the emergency department.

Every patient he sees is eventually going somewhere else.

He is a handoff machine.

He's also editor-in-chief of MedPage Today and the author of Inside Medicine, one of the most widely read medical newsletters in the country.

I am so excited to have Dr. Faust join us.

Let's take a look.

[upbeat music] Dr. Faust, I want to introduce you to our audience.

What was your path to becoming a physician? I also am fascinated to know more about your story as the director of the Longwood Chorus.

So please, start us off.