Physician Burnout, the Enlightened CFO and the Business Case for Physician Wellbeing
If your CFO fully understood the financial impact of physician burnout, they could be your biggest C-Suite physician wellness champion.
They could lead the Quadruple Aim charge by convincing the CEO, CMO and even the Board of Directors/Trustees to invest in the health and wellbeing of the providers. They could make a solid business case for a multifaceted return on investment (ROI) in physician wellness across the organization.
Why is this not taking place in every healthcare C-Suite on a regular basis?
In this blog post, let me show you the triple competitive advantage of physician well being and why the enlightened CFO is a key ally in our burnout prevention efforts.
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Three Key Business Reasons to Invest in Physician Wellness
1) Physician Burnout is the Single Largest Reversible Drag on Financial Performance
a) Physician Burnout is Everywhere, All the Time
The latest national US Surveys of physician burnout show a daily prevalence of OVER 60% !
Physician Burnout is everywhere all the time, whether or not your organization is doing anything about it at this time.
b) Burnout cripples the performance of the organization at multiple levels.
Burnout has a pervasively negative effect on the performance of everyone who sees patients. If you assume your people come to work happy, healthy and bringing their "A" Game, you are wrong. The latest surveys mean almost 2/3 of the physicians and staff are IMPAIRED By Burnout every day.- Quality
- Safety
- Medical Errors
- Patient Satisfaction
- Physician and Staff Engagement
- Productivity
- Your ability to recruit and retain quality staff and doctors
- and Turnover at all levels
2) If your performance is falling short in any of these areas, physician burnout is the #1 cause.
Quality indicators, patient satisfaction scores, medical errors and turnover are all now major financial pain points.
If you cannot hit your quality and satisfaction metrics
If you can't recruit and hold on to good people
If patient and staff satisfaction are in the toilet
You don’t have to be a CFO to see how each of these physician burnout effects hammers your bottom line.
Put them together and what have you got? If your business was a ship, you are taking on water from a dozen different holes in your hull and everyone is bailing as fast as they can to keep you afloat.
3) The Triple Competitive Advantage of Physician Wellness
When you take better care of your physicians and staff, you reverse the negative effects of physician burnout.
- Physicians are more engaged
- Change management becomes simpler and the organization more nimble
- Trust levels increase
- Recruitment and retention are easier
- Quality, Safety and patient and staff satisfaction scores increase
- Error rates and malpractice risk fall
- Recruitment and retention become easier
The Triple Competitive Advantage is Simple To See
a) You become the Provider of Choice to your patients and payors
Patients can feel the difference of happier, healthier doctors and staff in your facilities. The payors can see your superior performance across the metrics they use to track patient care, satisfaction and outcomes. The payors can see your care is more valuable than that from other provider organizations who don't take action to optimize physician wellbeing.
b) You become the employer of choice to the remaining independent doctors in your community
When independent doctors decide to become employees, they see you as the only logical choice because of the way you treat your people.
c) Your organization becomes more Nimble, Stable and Profitable than the competition.
Happier, healthier doctors are more productive, engaged. Turnover and churn are significantly decreased. Physician wellbeing leads to a healthier enterprise.
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Build Your Corporate Physician Wellness Strategy
Let Us Show You Where to Begin
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3) Physician Wellness Will Provide First Mover Advantage
A little bit of historical context first:
With the exception of Academic Institutions and certain longstanding large physician groups (Mayo, Cleveland Clinic, etc.), organizations that employ 100 or more physicians are a very new development in the US healthcare system.
Now every geographic area with a population of over 100,000 - across the USA - has one or more large physician employers, usually based on the local hospitals. In most cases the physicians were in private, doctor owned and operated practices until just a few years ago. Now the hospital owns them, their facilities and staff.
The doctors are obviously suffering from the loss of autonomy, and inefficient systems of care that are now mandated by their new employers. Burnout rates are sky high and pervasively damaging to the Profit and Loss Statement.
Each organization is trying to figure out how to manage the care and feeding of these large, diverse groups of providers - a task they have never had to master until this wave of consolidation began. No one is doing a good job, there is much low-hanging fruit.
A decisive first mover advantage is available to leadership teams who figure out a way to take better care of their physicians.
I doubt your CFO is making these points in the C-Suite right now. Here’s why the CFO is silent.
This whole process is invisible to them.
The costs of turnover, disengagement, disruptive behavior are not visible on the Profit and Loss Statement.
No one tells CFO’s what you just learned in the bullet points above. No one shows them the tax untreated physician burnout is placing on the Profit and Loss statement.
What they do pound the table for is cost cutting, higher patient flow and increased efficiency - all of which typically increase physician burnout.
The CEO is leaning over their shoulder looking for ways to run a tighter ship and that is the most obvious place to cut the fat.
Burnout is an elephant standing in the board room of every healthcare organization. Everyone does their best to ignore it. Most physicians and administrators have given up on things ever changing. It has gotten to the point where overwhelming workloads, barely manageable stress, compassion fatigue and turnover are considered normal for healthcare.
Your CFO needs to know this business case for physician well being ASAP
We must teach them the pervasive negative impact of burnout because an enlightened CFO can be your biggest ally in this battle.
We have to show them the massive negative effect burnout has on your bottom line profitability. If they understood the benefits of happier, healthier doctors, they would be pounding the boardroom table for a physician burnout prevention committee with a sizable budget.
An enlightened CFO understands the impact of physician burnout. They pound the boardroom table for things like …
Funds for annual physician and staff stress and burnout surveys
Funds for a standing Physician Burnout Working Group charged to minimize the stress inherent in the business systems in any way necessary
Funds for improvement projects based on the survey results
Funds for onsite training in the tools to recognize and prevent burnout for doctors and all staff
They understand that happy doctors are the source of happy patients and quality care
They realize that taking great care of your workers has multiple benefits that drop immediately to the bottom line
AND they can show the CEO the importance of physician burnout prevention funding
In the next several years, organizations with this kind of enlightened CFO will develop a competitive advantage in their respective marketplace. The patients will want to be seen there and the doctors will want to work there. Their ship will float high in the water without all the bailing their competitors require just to stay afloat.
PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT:
Does your CFO understand physician burnout?
What do they pound the table for in your organization?
Feel free to share this article with them and have them give me a call!