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

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?

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?

April was a busy burnout prevention training month at TheHappyMD.com

Here are the dates and trainings we delivered to well over 1000 doctors in April of 2019 -- and here is our speaking/training page where you can get us started customizing a training for your people. 

Whether you are looking to stop physician burnout or allow us to train your physician wellness champion - we offer the healthcare industry's best training experience. Over 170 organizations and well over 30,000 doctors trained to date. You can be next: Click Here to Learn More.

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1) For SVMIC - State Volunteer Mutual Insurance Company 

We delivered Burnout Proof Live Workshop to SVMIC individual and group malpractice insurance clients a total of  12 times in:

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 ]

Round On Your People

It is as simple as that ... and here is the monumental tragedy of current healthcare leadership behavior.

I have asked thousands of physician leaders - both physicians and non-doctor senior leaders - if they schedule time to round on or shadow their people. Their response is always the same. Just yesterday in a room of 30 CEO's and CMO's from independent groups around the USA, I asked that question -- and how many hands went up do you think??

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Stop The Madness
Help Us Lead the Physician Wellness Movement
Quadruple Aim Physician Leadership Retreat
Get Complete Details at This Link
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ZERO - not a single one

The next words out of my mouth were "shame on you." I am sure that is something they have never heard from a speaker before -- and yet they knew my critique was spot on.

Two Leadership Consequences of NOT Rounding

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: