Physician Burnout

At the HIMSS Annual conference, I talked with Vishal Gandhi, CEO of ClinicSpectrum, about a popular topic at the conference and well beyond: Physician Burnout. You can watch the full video interview I did with Vishal below:

Physician Burnout is such an important topic and I love that Vishal commented that physician satisfaction (the remedy to burnout) is good patient care and an appropriate reward. As it is today, the trend is to ask doctors to compromise good patient care and we’re paying them less in the process. Is there any wonder why physician burnout is so rampant?

Vishal also commented that healthcare technology is used more for documentation than patient care. He argued that the tech piece has focused far too much on documentation as opposed to focusing on the patient. I’d argue that if we focused the tech on the patient, doctors would appreciate technology much more and would be less burnt out.

Finally, I’m always interested to hear what non-EHR technologies Vishal and ClinicSpectrum have launched to make a practice more efficient and profitable. He outlines a bunch of them in the video above. Take a listen and see if some of them can make your life easier and your practice more profitable. It’s time we start considering technology outside the EHR that can make a practice better.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

2 Comments

  • Good topic – highlights the error of moving the focus too far away from patient care to reimbursement/regulation.

    Reimbursement can be simplified, the government can decrease regulation but the industry will largely remain “stuck” with EHRs that have the wrong focus.

    The solution (expensive, because of the sunk cost in existing EHRs) would be to allow clinics/hospitals to map out their best practices and work the way they want to work (i.e. put the focus on the patient whilst dealing in a reasonable way with the realities of reimbursement and the need for some regulation).

    Physicians seem to be asking themselves whether the $44,000 Medicare or $63,75 Medicaid incentive was good and valuable consideration for agreeing to sign up to be a “data troll”

  • Karl,
    I think it’s probably even worse than you describe. I also don’t see any easy pathway from where we are (ie. all the sunk costs and system inertia) to where we need to be.

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