Mastering the Art of Patient Care

Like a mentor you may turn to in times of crisis, this book provides the wisdom earned from countless mentors and patients. You may be standing on the precipice of medical training or well into your career, trying to recapture the joy of medicine. A love of people and a love of science barely capture the essence of a life in medicine; there is so much more to being a physician than the ability to diagnose and treat diseases.
While nothing can fully prepare you for the fear and anxiety that comes with inexperience, Mastering the Art of Patient Care eases some of that uncertainty with a system for surviving and thriving in medical school and beyond. Whatever your stage, the goal of this book is to share successes and failures to help you be a physician who takes outstanding care of patients, colleagues, and trainees and derives great joy from saving lives.

About the Author
Michelle Kittleson is Professor of Medicine at Cedars-Sinai, Director of Education in Heart Failure and Transplantation, and Director of Heart Failure Research at the Smidt Heart Institute. She graduated from Harvard College and received her medical degree from Yale University. She completed residency training at Brigham and Women's Hospital and cardiology fellowship at Johns Hopkins, where she also received a PhD in Clinical Investigation from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Dr. Kittleson is an international expert in heart failure and transplantation. She is Deputy Editor of the Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation, on Guideline Writing Committees for the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association, Co-Editor-in-Chief for the American College of Cardiology Heart Failure Self-Assessment Program, and on the Board of Directors for the Heart Failure Society of America.

Dr. Kittleson's essays have appeared in New England Journal of Medicine, Annals of Internal Medicine, and JAMA Cardiology and her poems have been published in JAMA. Annals of Internal Medicine, and Pharos. She has created #kittlesonrules on Twitter, a compendium of tips on how to improve patient care from optimizing communication with patients and colleagues to optimizing medical education to learning from mistakes. These tips have garnered the strong support of over 30,000 followers.