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Recent literature has described how the capacity for concurrent self-assessment--ongoing moment-to-moment self-monitoring--is an important component of the professional competence of physicians. Self-monitoring refers to the ability to notice our own actions, curiosity to examine the effects of those actions, and willingness to use those observations to improve behavior and thinking in the future. Self-monitoring allows for the early recognition of cognitive biases, technical errors, and emotional reactions and may facilitate self-correction and development of therapeutic relationships. Cognitive neuroscience has begun to explore the brain functions associated with self-monitoring, and the structural and functional changes that occur during mental training to improve attentiveness, curiosity, and presence. This training involves cultivating habits of mind such as experiencing information as novel, thinking of "facts" as conditional, seeing situations from multiple perspectives, suspending categorization and judgment, and engaging in self-questioning. The resulting awareness is referred to as "mindfulness" and the associated moment-to-moment self-monitoring as "mindful practice"--in contrast to being on" automatic pilot" or "mindless" in one's behavior. This article is a preliminary exploration into the intersection of educational assessment, cognitive neuroscience, and mindful practice, with the hope of promoting ways of improving clinicians' capacity to self-monitor during clinical practice, and, by extension, improve the quality of care that they deliver. (Contains 3 tables.)

Medical family therapy grew out of the experiences of family therapists working with other professionals to provide comprehensive, integrated healthcare for patients. This is the story of one such patient and provides an account of the experience through quotes from videotaped sessions and electronic mail communications that occurred throughout the course of therapy. (BF)

The study aims to evaluate whether there are any benefits of an educational program in mindfulness, communication and self-awareness in improving the wellbeing, burnout and psychological stress of primary care physicians. The results indicate that such programs were found to be beneficial in improving the health and wellbeing of physicians.

Most practicing physicians have to assess the competence of trainees, peers, and other health professionals, but they may not be very comfortable using education assessment tools. A conceptual framework for commonly used and emerging methods of assessment is provided together with a discussion on the strengths and weaknesses of each method and the challenges of assessing physicians' professional competence and performance.

Many prior studies which suggest a relationship between physician interactional style and patient outcomes may have been confounded by relying solely on patient reports, examining very few patients per physician, or not demonstrating evidence of a physician effect on the outcomes. We examined whether physician interactional style, measured both by patient report and objective encounter ratings, is related to performance on quality of care indicators. We also tested for the presence of physician effects on the performance indicators. Using data on 100 US primary care physician (PCP) claims data on 1,21,606 of their managed care patients, survey delta on 4746 of their visiting patients, and audiotaped encounters of 2 standardized patients with each physician, we examined the relationships between claims-based quality of care indicators and both survey-derived patient perceptions of their physicians and objective ratings of interactional style in the audiotaped standardized patient encounters. Multi-level models examined whether physician effects (variance components) on care indicators were mediated by patient perceptions or objective ratings of interactional style. We found significant physician effects associated with glycohemoglobin and cholesterol testing. There was also a clinically significant association between better patient perceptions of their physicians and more glycohemoglobin testing. Multi-level analyses revealed, however, that the physician effect on glycohemoglobin testing was not mediated by patient perceived physician interaction style. In conclusion, similar to prior studies, we found evidence of an apparent relationship between patient perceptions of their physician and patient outcomes. However, the apparent relationships found in this study between patient perceptions of their physicians and patient care processes do not reflect physician style, but presumably reflect unmeasured patient confounding. Multi-level modeling may contribute to better understanding of the relationships between physician style and patient outcomes. Keywords: USA; Provider-patient communication; Quality of care; Multi-level analysis; Adherence

In our view, the biopsychosocial model is a vision and an approach to practice rather than an empirically verifiable theory, a coherent philosophy, or a clinical method. In some cases, [...]