What about the future? Oncologists and their teams are learning to deal with the perils and pitfalls of practicing in a new environment driven by high expectations, high technology, and low budgets. The oncology practitioners know that to be vigilant is to maintain good doctor-patient and team-team member communication, maintain follow-up, and keep good records in either old or new EHR formats. One future trend that may ultimately find its way into the medical and medico-legal armamentarium of the oncologist is a checklist which may help reduce the frequency of adverse events and errors. Mulligan concludes, “We are all human and we all make mistakes, and for this reason we will need things like checklists and systems in place, such as algorithms.”
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