If you have any experience with hospitals (and who doesn’t, unfortunately?) you know of the “Doctors’ visit” ritual. Once or twice a day a procession of the attending doctors go from room to room in a ward, followed by nurses and a cart that once had all the patients’ paper files and these days may have a computer on it instead. It is a solemn affair, and the patients and their families hold their breaths as they await the experts’ verdict regarding the situation of this patient or that. Meanwhile other people are kept out of the  ward – the physicians need to concentrate, and their visit is religiously shielded from all disturbance.

Or is it? I was at the World Usability Day conference recently, and after lecturing on Information Overload in corporate settings I was treated to a fascinating lecture by Prof. Yoel Donchin of the Hadassah Medical School, who has been studying the matter of interruptions and distractions during these medical visits. These were defined as anything that causes the doctor to focus attention on something other than the purpose of the visit. The research was done in detail and with careful statistical methodology. Care to guess how many times, on average, a group of visiting doctors are distracted during a two-hour visit?

Did you guess 80? Yep… the exact figure is 83 distractions per visit.  Some of these are bearable perhaps, like noisy activities in the background or nurses talking among themselves, but there were nine distractions per visit that forced a full suspension of the execution of the visit for a while, like phone calls and unrelated conversations involving the visiting doctors.

Obviously, the ability of the medics to focus on the matter at hand – the patients and their illnesses – must suffer a good deal with all this interrupting going on at a rate of once every 1.5 minutes. In that respect things are no different than with other knowledge workers in other environments – and yet, in a hospital setting this is really worrying. It is at least encouraging that Hadassah is conducting this in-depth research to understand what is happening in detail – and, I understand from Dr. Donchin, to examine remedial changes in the procedures and organizational culture that make this reality possible.