Lindsay Mobley, PA and COO at PGTW Internal Medicine, described MedFlow as their external brain. It automates processes and brings to light important items to address during visits, she said, so the team can focus on the patient sitting in front of them.
We did not write that phrase, and it is more precise than the language we had been using ourselves.
What a clinician is actually holding
In any given visit a clinician is tracking the reason the patient came in, the history that matters, the medications, the things that should have happened since the last visit and did not, and the handful of preventive items the patient is quietly due for.
Most of that is not clinical difficulty. It is load. It is the effort of holding several open threads at once while also being present with a person who is worried about something.
The threads that get dropped are predictable. They are the ones with no symptom attached: the screening that is not urgent this month, the follow-up that can wait, the item that has waited before and will probably wait again.
Remembering is a bad thing to be good at
A common response to dropped threads is to ask people to be more thorough. Checklists, huddles, reminders, a culture of catching things.
Those help, and they are also the wrong layer to solve it at. Asking humans to be reliable at recall is asking them to spend attention on the part of the job a system is genuinely better at, and to spend it during the exact minutes they should be spending on the patient.
The alternative is not a smarter clinician. It is a system that surfaces the item before anyone has to remember it exists.
What the phrase gets right
An external brain is not a replacement brain. Nobody at PGTW is suggesting the software makes clinical decisions.
It holds the things that do not need judgment so that judgment has room. The patient is due for this. That order never resulted. This referral has been open for six weeks. Those are facts, not decisions, and a person should not have to carry them.
What is left, once the facts are handled, is the part of the visit that actually needs a clinician. Which is what the job was supposed to be.