doc w/ Pen

As many of you know, I write a monthly column for the online magazine The American. Here is my latest piece, describing an important first of my medical career. You can read the original article here.

“The order”

I placed my first medication order yesterday. Nothing exotic. It was a one-time dose of the drug Labetalol for a patient, my patient, whose blood pressures had been elevated. As I typed in my password to sign the order, I took a deep breath.

“By signing this,” I thought to myself, “I’m telling people that I think my patient needs this exact medication at this exact dose at this exact time.”

Suddenly, caring for this patient was no longer abstract or hypothetical. It was as real as the prescription I was about to issue. I wasn’t just writing out my daily plan for her care in my morning progress note. I was putting it into action.

As a medical student, any orders I place require a physician cosigner, either my resident or attending. The safety net exists for obvious reasons. Still, learning how to issue orders for my patients — whether it’s for laboratory tests or medications or fluids — and then doing so is part of assuming greater clinical responsibility. It’s also part of progressing from student to doctor.

But from a logistical perspective, just entering these orders is far from easy. Take the blood pressure medication. It is normally dosed twice a day, morning and night. It was about 1 p.m. at the time. If we ordered it twice a day to begin immediately, the patient would get it at 1 p.m. and 1 a.m. — not ideal if you’re the patient. You’d have to be awakened in the middle of the night to take a pill.

So I placed a one-time order for the medication to be given by the nurse immediately. I then placed another order for the same medication, same dose, this time twice a day, but starting that night. Going forward, the patient would be getting her pill at 9 a.m. and 9 p.m.

Making small things happen in the electronic medical record system is another thing entirely. It requires selecting or unselecting many checkboxes and highlighting the appropriate fields in various drop-down menus. I’m sure once you do it repeatedly it becomes second nature. But as a medication order novice, I needed someone to show me around the system. Thankfully, my kind resident took the time to walk me through the process step by step. Attention is paramount. If you don’t click (or unclick) one of the required boxes, you get an error message that reroutes you back to the order screen to fix your mistake. And if you don’t click (or unclick) some other box that’s important for your particular instructions but not technically required for the order to go through, your order may inadvertently tell the nurse to do something else altogether.

The “how” of these orders is the easy part. It’s the “what” and the “why” that require the real thinking. Why is the patient’s blood pressure elevated? Does she need a medication? If so, which one? At what dose and frequency? How long will you assess her blood pressure levels to determine if this medication is effective before either increasing its dose or adding another drug? And this is only her blood pressure. We haven’t gotten started on her antibiotic regimen.

It’s an iterative process that goes on throughout any given day. Sometimes you’re doing the investigating. Sometimes it comes in response to changes in vital signs or laboratory results (or urine output or an MRI). This means you’re monitoring all these details — vital signs, lab tests, urine output, and imaging, among others — over the course of a day to see if you need to change your handling of the patient.

To a third-year medical student just introduced to the world of inpatient internal medicine, it’s dizzying. But it’s also deeply exciting for obvious reasons. The more clinical responsibility I assume, the more I learn, and the more tangible the “live” practice of medicine becomes. And the more I am prepared for the time when I’ll be the one signing the orders on my own.