Hey Physicians! How much do you LOVE seeing patients in virtual visits from your HOME Computer - rather than from your office/hospital work station??

In our monthly Physicians on Purpose community support call last night, we brainstormed our list of positives.

Here's what we have so far:

• No commute
• Sleep in later 
• Get outside
• Pets stopping by to say hello
• Eat better
• Have time for short meditation
• Less interruptions by staff
• Able to think in complete thoughts and sentences
• Better control over your home environment

Why is it so darn difficult for people to see you are a good doctor these days?

We both know you are a good doctor. When it comes to diagnosing and treating your patient's diseases and chief complaints, you do a great job. None of us devoted our 20's to med school and residency to be a crappy doctor, right? 

So why is it so hard for the patients to see that when they are filling out their patient satisfaction surveys?

Why is there such a disparity between your efforts to offer the best medical care and their Press Ganey scores??

ARRRGGHH...

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It takes a while for most physicians to understand the source of this double standard. That is why this whole topic of patient satisfaction is a core cause of physician burnout.

Sooner or later all of us must admit ...
When it comes to the cursed gap between the quality of your Practice of Clinical Medicine and your Patient Satisfaction scores ... 

Your patients can't tell a good doctor from a bad one.

There is plenty of evidence that Physician Burnout has a negative effect on a doctor's quality of care

Make's sense, right?

If you are a physician who is

• exhausted
• cynical and sarcastic
• and doubting that your work is making a difference

- BTW, these are the three cardinal symptoms of burnout - 
If that is the way you are feeling today at work, you care clearly not on your "A" Game as a clinician and healer ... right? Oh yes, and in the average healthcare workplace, 50% of the doctors are suffering from at least one symptom of burnout on each practice day.

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

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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. 

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 highly-suspect projection has zero chance of improving the quality of life of a single front-line physician for the simplest of reasons ...

Compassion Fatigue is one of the psychological consequences of being a doctor

Losing the ability to feel empathy, sympathy and compassion for your patients is a constant risk for all of us.

This is a consequence of your choice to become a Lightworker years ago.

That choice guaranteed our exposure to the trauma, tragedy and agony of our patient's struggles. No one teaches you that compassion is a finite resource that must be regularly refilled or physician burnout is inevitable for all of us.

In this blog post, let me show you

• why doctors are at unique risk for Compassion Fatigue and burnout ... it is the result of a decision you made long ago
• how to recognize Compassion Fatigue
• the four phases of Compassion Fatigue – where do you stand?
• a specific method to restore your Emotional Energy Reserves and recover from your own Compassion Fatigue
• and finish with a set of online Compassion Fatigue resources if you would like more tools or to study this important topic in more detail

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The Origin of this Lightworker’s Dilemma

Let’s start at the beginning
– the point in time where you chose to become a doctor in the first place

You remember that fork in the road?

Chief Wellness Officer - CWO - does your organization need one?

It is all the rage in leadership circles these days. The mucky mucks are all in agreement. If your organization is serious about preventing burnout, the very first thing you need to do is appoint a Chief Wellness Officer - and watch the angry, dark clouds of burnout lift - revealing the rainbows and unicorns of a happy, healthy physician workforce.

This is Magical Thinking of the highest order

Let's drink the CWO KoolAide for just a moment ... to recognize it is just another version of checking a box.

This C-Suite executive will be your savior, your cavalry cresting the ridge, your knight in shining armor, your hero among the bean counters. At the very least, they should be able to stop the rest of the C-suite from hammering the doctors into little tiny pieces.

Would your people or your organization actually benefit from installing a Chief Wellness officer - CWO

The answer of course is "IT DEPENDS"
[ And for 99% of healthcare organizations a CWO is a distraction from building a wellness program in the first place ]

What about the doctors who don't return the burnout study - the non-respondents?

Are they different than the ones who do respond ?Specifically, are they more or less burned out than the people who send in the survey the first time they are asked??

For years this has been the biggest mystery surrounding any survey of physician burnout rates. It is a question I field often at our live training events. Up until now I have not been able to quote any research that attempted to answer the question.

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Well now we have answer

The recent edition of the original physician burnout Super Study we wrote about in the last blog post contains a hidden second wave of surveys that solves this fundamental mystery. 

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Related:
The Fatal Flaws in the Burnout Survey Industry
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This survey modification actually gives us three important new data points:

Mayo's physician burnout super-study finally released their third round of data from the 2017 survey.

This was that infamous first study documenting burnout rates above 50% in US physicians in Mayo Clinic Proceedings using US physician burnout surveys performed in 2011 and 2014 compared to burnout in the general US population.

It is probably the single most important data point in the birth of the movement to track and address burnout in physicians. That movement has spread far and wide since 2011, culminating in the current wave of industry-wide confabs like the NAM Action Collaborative on Clinician Wellbeing and Resilience.

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Since 2014 we have been waiting patiently for that third round of surveys to report out. Show us the 2017 data please, please, please ... and here it is.

When managers/leaders drive for production in the face of physician burnout ... this quote becomes the leadership lesson of the day.

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Unfortunately the absence of empathy and understanding is often a blind spot in physician leaders.