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Feels like we have reached a tipping point in the debate about addressing our modern physician burnout epidemic.

People are running out of patience with the healthcare industry ... and appropriately so.

For the last five years physician burnout rates have hovered around 50% and the industry has responded in its usual academic fashion. Task Forces and Action Collaboratives have been organized, position papers and intellectual models published and a flurry of research into one prevention tool at a time is in the pipeline. They are struggling to "solve" what they think is a "problem" and missing the true nature of burnout in the process. The deck chairs have simply been rearranged.

... All while the whirlwind of your practice day slowly intensifies beyond your capacity to cope. 

But something has changed very recently. Here's what I have noticed just in the last month or so on the internet ...

For the first time I am seeing mainstream articles calling for two new approaches to the burnout swamping our people in the front lines.

• New Government Regulation - as if we didn't have enough regulation already
  
  
• A Physician's Union to enable collective bargaining with "the man"
  
  

It is as if a certain slice of the general public and the physicians of America have given up on our healthcare industry taking care of its own issues any time soon. 

I have a quick question for you ...

The Quadruple Aim

Guiding Principle:

The only authentic foundation for high quality, low cost medical care and an optimal patient experience
-- is the health and wellbeing of the doctors and staff who provide the care.

The Quadruple Aim
Provides a Triple Competitive Advantage

Organizations who take better care of their providers and staff, create three distinct advantages over their regional competition.

1) You will become the Provider of Choice to local patients and local payors. Patients will notice your caring and quality. Payors will see superior quality metrics. You will stand out from the crowd.

2) You will become the Employer of Choice for the local unaffiliated doctors because of your culture and more efficient systems of care. It will be easier to recruit and retain quality providers.

3) You will become a more Nimble, Stable and Adaptable Organization going forward for two simple reasons. Your Quadruple Aim focus provides the enterprise with naturally higher levels of trust and engagement and much lower turnover rates.

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Realize the Quadruple Aim is a nested phenomenon - like the famous Russian dolls. 

What would you say about an industry that reliably burns out half of their most valuable workers ...

• Workers that take over a decade to train
• Are the point of origin for 100% of gross revenue
• And for which there is already a massive shortage that will get much worse in the near future

This same industry clearly understands that physician burnout harms and kills patients and doctors and has a massive negative effect on the organization's bottom line.

What words are most appropriate to describe such insane behavior? [even Lemmings would appear to be more interested in their own survival]

When you realize the job demands on the average doctor are a clear and present danger to the doctors, the staff and their patients, it is not uncommon for the term ClusterF*ck to come to mind. Sometimes you will even let it slip with your outside voice ... right?

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Hang on a second, is that term even accurate?

Follow along with me as we explore the semantics and I give you 5 simple ways to begin clawing your organization out of this morass ... no matter what you personally call it.

TheHappyMD.com Strategic Partnership with SE Healthcare

TheHappyMD.com has recently formed a joint venture and strategic partnership with SE Healthcare to create and launch The Physician Burnout Prevention Program, the most comprehensive enterprise-level physician burnout strategy on the market.

The program uses a unique, customizable survey tool, to identify the level of physician burnout, then delivers proven tools to lower stress and prevent burnout at two levels:
- for the individual physician taking the survey
- and the leadership team overseeing the culture and systems of care

New Study proves EMR is the Kraken of physician stressors - a multi-armed nightmare of overwhelm - where the Progress Note is the least of our worries.

The modern Electronic Medical Record is so much more than just a method to create a digital Progress Note. Yes, indeed. That is just the start of its contributions to the quality of your daily practice experience. 

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Get a Proven Strategy to Cut EMR Stress
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>> Leaders Click Here
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Your EMR's ability to send out multiple arms of stress into your work day ... each one sucking time and attention away from actually taking care of patients ... is so perfectly toxic to the practice of medicine, that a horror metaphor from the high seas is appropriate here. 

EMR is the Kraken of physician stressors

You remember the Kraken; that ship-eating massive squid monster that would crunch your three masted schooner like a bag of potato chips and tear you limb from limb with the eagle beak hiding in the place where its legs all meet -  YUCK and OUCH !! 

Why a Kraken? Eight separate arms, any one of which can wrap around your throat and choke you out of your practice day. You can chop off seven and he/she/it can still wrap you up and take you down.

One of the arms of the EMR Kraken is the perfect click storm you must wade through just to document a simple Progress Note. This one task is onerous enough all by itself now that it is digital.

But the Progress Note doesn't seem to be the worst stressor for doctors.

A balanced presentation on Physician Burnout in the mainstream media is rare in my experience

I always am a little uptight when I talk to a reporter about the burnout epidemic. You never know what will end up on the cutting room floor, the number of ways you can be misquoted is infinite and the doctor haters are everywhere on the internet.

So it was very refreshing when Dr. Michael Peterson invited me in to deliver an All Day Training Event to the good people at UCSF Fresno ( @UCSFFresno ) earlier this year and Connie Tran from the local TV station filmed and edited this segment for a weekly weekend spot called MedWatch Today.

Fair, balanced, empathetic towards the doctors and a straightforward presentation of the issue. How refreshing!!

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This is Blog Post #302
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Videos like this will be key to implementation of the Quadruple Aim in our fractured healthcare system. Only when a critical mass of the general public - our patients - are up in arms about physician burnout and asking legitimate questions about

• the health and wellbeing of their physician
• and the effects of burnout on the quality of care they receive

... only then, can we expect active burnout prevention measures in healthcare delivery organizations nationwide.

This is a good first step IMHO.

PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT

• What do you think about the representation of burnout in the lay press?
• Have any local news outlets in your area done a balanced job of reporting on this issue?

Does the Healthcare Industry Exploit Doctors? 

Dr. Danielle Ofri - author of the book What Doctors Feel - wrote a groundbreaking piece in the New York Times this week entitled: The Business of Health Care Depends on Exploiting Doctors and Nurses

In the article she writes:
"Counting on nurses and doctors to suck it up because you know they won’t walk away from their patients is not just bad strategy. It’s bad medicine." 
We couldn't agree more.

Unfortunately, her article then crashes and burns in an impossible recommendation that half of all US Healthcare Administrators be fired, because:
"If we converted even half of those salary lines to additional nurses and doctors, we might have enough clinical staff members to handle the work."
Duh! AND I think we agree no organization is going to take her up on that change in business model. 

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Stop The Madness
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Quadruple Aim Physician Leadership Retreat
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In this post let me show you

• Why we agree with Dr. Ofri that physician exploitation is built into the industrial practice of medicine
  
  
• Some simple Case Study examples of exploitation from our thousands of hours of physician burnout coaching client files
  
  
• The Triple Competitive Advantage if your Leadership Team STOPS Exploiting the Doctors and begins to Practice the Quadruple Aim Instead

Physician Burnout may cost the US Healthcare System $4.6 Billion per  year, but does this data point help lower the stress of a single front line doctor?

 A new study out in Annals of Internal Medicine this week uses a cost-effectiveness approach to estimate the annual economic burden of physician burnout on the US Healthcare System. $4,600,000,000 per year was their estimate. The free floating anxiety in the headlines was palpable.

I just wish we could focus on useful research findings like Corey Lyon and his APEX Project ... and let's give real-world burnout prevention tools the same headlines as this fluff. 

I will classify this as an INTERESTING AND USELESS factoid.

I work directly with physicians and healthcare organizations every day to prevent burnout and am pretty sure this number is useless in my line of work. 

It is in the same category as knowing Pi to 10 digits (3.141592653) or how may toothpicks you would need to lay end-to-end to get from Milwaukee to Chicago (2,882,880).

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This is Blog Post #300
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This highly-suspect projection has zero chance of improving the quality of life of a single front-line physician for the simplest of reasons ...

The World Health Organization may have just classified burnout as a disease. I am pretty sure that would be a Very Bad Thing for over-stressed physicians!

Headlines today on the recently concluded WHO meeting in Geneva, are blaring news that burnout has been reclassified as a disease. Here is my input on that potential development.
[this story has been updated, see below]

Let me say right up front that burnout is a NORMAL RESPONSE to overwhelming stress in any person who takes on the role of a helper. For physicians, that role is the core of our professional activities, encapsulated perfectly in the mantra, "The Patient Comes First". 

An official disease designation is a Big Deal ... and Not in a Good Way, IMHO

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Burnout is much more often a diagnosis that the WORKPLACE is SICK ... NOT THE DOCTOR! This potential disease designation would drop all burned out physicians into the gaping maw of the mental health industry -- rather than continuing current trends focused on making workplace changes to lower stress.

Here is my fear

Stop Physician Burnout - you just do not party nearly enough

In this post let me show you a quick, fun, powerful method to build a more supportive culture among any group of physicians - a method most groups completely ignore.

Because of the power of an active Social Calendar (partying more), this is one of the four components of our Quadruple Aim Blueprint Strategy for Corporate Wellness.

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Whenever I am in front of a room of 100 - 200 - 300 physicians delivering a live training, I always ask them this question ...

"How many of you can look around the room and see someone you have never met before?"

How many hands do you think go up?