Solutions for Medical Burnout

Over the past few months, I’ve written enough posts on Medical Burnout that I have created a new category to house them.  Readers will find there posts detailing the causes and consequences of burnout in the medical profession.

The profession has been long on the causes but short on solutions.  What must be done to loosen the burnout shackles from medical professionals?

It will be a huge undertaking for caregivers and society at large to turn this ocean liner around.  And it will take time.  The first step must be to obtain a commitment to the overall mission from as many constituents as possible.  Support will be needed from medical professionals, hospital leadership and administrators, physician employers, insurance companies and the public.  As with many reform efforts, many of the players must be willing to sacrifice some of their own interests in order to server the greater good – a worthy and rare event.  Without adequate buy-in from stakeholders, the effort will never get airborne.

Can we turn the ocean liner around?

Once we have the collective will to proceed, then we can start our liberating efforts. While every scintilla of drudgery and nonsense can't be eliminated from the workplace, there is much that needs to be on the chopping block.  

 I’d start first with the paperwork.  Is megadocumentation (not a real word but it should be) truly an essential medical job function, or simply a task that grinds down doctors and others and then requires another level of supervisors to monitor it?  When I do a colonoscopy, every member of the team is documenting stuff. Is it important?  Ask how often I or anyone has dives into this sea of minutiae.  Hardly ever.  Is it really worth the hundreds and hundreds of hours it takes to input the data?  Is streamlining possible?

If employers and health systems claim to champion medical quality, then stop driving the caregivers to reach ever increasing volume targets.  Give physicians enough time with their patients and watch morale and quality and the patient experience all head northward.  The financial cost in my view will be outweighed by retaining a motivated and loyal medical and administrative staff.  Take care of your people and they will take care of you.

Physicians should have built in protected time that can be devoted to administrative tasks.

The volume of e-mails and other communications that doctors field every day is excessive.  Many of the e-mails I receive are duplicates of each other.  Many have attachments that I realize afterwards don’t apply to me.  It’s overwhelming. Are all of the forms, meetings and compliance renewals truly necessary?  Couldn’t written transcripts of meetings be substituted for attendance to save time?

I burn up many hours reissuing prescriptions that are denied for one reason or another by the pharmacy or the insurance company.  They have their reasons but from my end it’s a recurrent, time-burning irritant that I endure several times each week. 

Patients will also be part of the solution.  I respond personally to thousands of electronic inquiries from my patients usually on the day received.  Most doctors share this experience.  They take time including a review of the record in order for me to issue a thoughtful response.  The truth is that many of these issues are routine and can safely wait until the next office visit.  We have over time permitted out patients to feel that they have unlimited access to their doctors.  I think we need our patients’ understanding that this needs to be rebalanced.  Some institutions are charging patients for portal advice in an effort to decrease volume. 

There are business professionals whose expertise is to create efficiencies in corporate and manufacturing systems.  I’m sure that if these folks hung out for a few weeks in the medical arena, that they could create binders full of recommendations on how the medical profession can divest itself from the noise and static that are clogging up our days and our minds.

So, do we have the will to move forward on this?  If not, and burnout flames on, then we might be left with a huge pile of ashes.