A Country Doctor Writes:

Before EMRs, information flowed through nurses and secretaries (remember that word, anyone?) to us doctors. And it was generally prioritized, if not with clinical expertise, at least with a healthy amount of common sense. This allowed us to get to urgent and important results and messages before less urgent ones.

Even with early EMRs, paper reports would arrive, get sorted, reviewed and acted on before getting scanned in – often with a quick signature and comment scribbled on the bottom. We might note “repeat 1 year” on a normal mammogram or instruct our staff to “Order CT w contrast” on an abnormal chest X-ray. This was a very quick way to review and delegate. The doctor did what only the doctor could do and other staff did the rest. It was even possible to have a standing order that all women with a normal mammogram get scheduled for their next one automatically.

You can visualize the flow of information as a triangle, flowing from many sources at the base through support staff to the clinician, at the top, as the decision maker. The information would then flow back one step down the triangle to the person who presented it to the doctor.

(Paper napkin sketches © A Country Doctor Writes, LLC; may be reproduced with back link.)

We often communicated verbally and in person. The nurse or medical assistant might tell the doctor on a Monday morning, “these three patients were in the ER this weekend and need follow ups this week, Mr Jones ideally no later than Tuesday”.

Working this way, we were a team. We communicated effectively in real time.

Now, even if we work at desks in the same room, our communication is mostly asynchronous, very much like email. And our inboxes offer few ways of prioritizing information.

And the worst and most dangerous difference between the old and the new information flow through the EMR is that all results and outside reports arrive directly in the doctor’s electronic inbox (and we often have dozens of different inboxes to monitor) UNSEEN BY ANYONE ELSE.

So it is now, theoretically, up to the doctor on a Monday morning to open up and read the weekend ER reports (scrolling through multiple pages in a small view box on the computer screen, looking for the followup instructions) and then electronically forward the report with comments to the support staffer.

The reason we have to do this is to generate an electronic record of when we read the report and what we did with it. This seems to largely be for liability purposes, so that if anything goes wrong, the doctor can be held responsible.

Today’s information flow triangle is upside down: Its foundation, read entry point, is the medical provider. It is the team leader who has to touch and timestamp (in the background) everything and then electronically spoon feed it to the other team members.

This “workflow” makes sense to computer people, statisticians and malpractice attorneys. But it makes doctors spend inordinately more time staring at their computer screens and less time with their patients.

I guess, if EMRs were more nimble than they are now, this upside-down workflow would be slightly less cumbersome, although equally dangerous.

It is disheartening to hear about AI and how smart computers are supposed to be these days while we have to follow awkward, multistep computer routines to accomplish things that Alexa can do effortlessly in peoples’ homes.

But the bottom line is that, in today’s mostly fee-for-service environment, doctors are under pressure to generate revenue, which means face-to-face encounters. Time at the computer, reading inboxes, refilling prescriptions and responding to patient portal messages are things that practices generally don’t get paid for, so doctors seldom have enough (or any) time set aside to do them.

With all the worry we constantly hear about physician shortages and the burnout epidemic among us, medical practices really must question the current way they want us to manage the flow of information in our offices. It is hugely inefficient and actually quite dangerous.

In what other type of business does the decision maker open the mail and then hand it to the support staff?

How would it be if we borrowed a page from the paper chart playbook and figured out better ways to leverage physician input than we have with today’s EMR-imposed bottlenecking of information? I think it’s high time we turn the triangle back right-side-up!

Shame on the American Medical Association

Victor Frankl did his own mental health reframing in the concentration camp, but it was the allied forces who freed him and the other prisoners. Our side never contemplated sending therapists to help the Jews cope with their captivity. But that is exactly what the AMA is doing.

Physicians today are captives of the computer systems that regulate their every move, monitor their performance and restrict their right to be off duty by bombarding them with an uninterrupted flow of data.

I joined the AMA in residency, in part to buy discounted insurance through them and in part to belong to an organization I thought would protect my interest. In retrospect, 40 years later, it is clear that they never did.

Do we need a new organization to take their place, since they have obviously failed to protect our interests? I believe we do.

This morning’s email newsletter headline almost made me choke on my coffee. Read it and weep.

This weekend I read a piece in The New York Times that put a slightly different slant on what burnout, in the case of physician burnout, is or is caused by. We have heard theories from being asked to do the wrong thing, like data entry, to “moral injury” to my favorite, “burnout skills“, when you keep trying to do the impossible because people praise you when you pull it off.

Tish Harrison Warren’s piece is a dialog between her and psychiatrist/author Curt Thompson. He focuses on isolation as a driver of burnout:

Assume that if you’re burned out, your brain needs the help of another brain. Your brain is not going to be OK until or unless you have the experience and opportunity of being in the presence of someone else who can begin to ask you the kind of questions that will allow you to name the things that you’re experiencing.

The moment that you start to tell your story vulnerably to someone else, and that person meets you with empathy — without trying to fix your loneliness, without trying to fix your shame — your entire body will begin to change. Not all at once. But you feel distinctly different.

I’m not as lonely in that moment because you are with me. And I sense you sensing me. That’s a neural reality.

I have written about burnout many times. The NYT article made me remember that I once also wrote about missing the doctors lounge and how I once tried to start a slack group among my colleagues. It never really took off but I think the point about isolation feeding burnout is very valid. Back when there were doctors lounges, we would talk with colleagues. Even in the office when I started out we scribbled our chart notes very quickly and then we would have time and space to discuss our cases or other things with our colleagues. Now we are tied to the computers, feeding the big machine that controls each of our lives.

As often before, my thoughts go to a James Taylor song, one about working in isolation to feed a big machine – Millworker:

Then it’s me and my machine

For the rest of the morning

For the rest of the afternoon

And the rest of my life

And, later:

And I have been the fool

To let this manufacturer

Use my body for a tool

But, when all is said and done, I am not burned out, as I say in one of my videos. I work at looking beyond my obstacles and I focus on my patient encounters and my curiosity.

But I wish I wasn’t as isolated as I am, in part simply due to the pandemic. I mean, even medical staff meetings are virtual these days. Like Hollywood Squares…

I am a 68 year old family physician in rural Maine. This morning I read yet another article about physician burnout, this time in The New York Times. (I’m not linking to it, because they have a “paywall”.)

I did not end up exactly where and how I expected to be at the end of my career, or life in general to be brutally honest. But I am the happiest I have been since the beginning of my journey in medicine.

I have a balance in my life I didn’t have, or even seek, for many years as I juggled patient care, administration, raising a family and pursuing interests that often brought me away from home.

My days in the clinic are a bit shorter than they used to be, but in the past several years I have had to do much more work from home – even more so in the last two. The “half-empty glass” way to look at this is that work has intruded more into my personal life and my home. The “half-full” view is that I can do my computer work when it suits me the best. For one of my clinic positions, I can do charting on an iPad mini in bed, coffe on my nightstand and sleeping dogs at my feet. The clumsier EMR requires a laptop (which in my view can’t be used the way its name might suggest) I sometimes work on in the barn and sometimes on a picnic table in the grass outside.

Ironically, the pandemic has brought me a peace and clarity I probably wouldn’t have achieved otherwise.

I had thought moving back to Caribou for a position with no administrative responsibilities would open up social opportunities I hadn’t allowed myself for the last few years. I expected to become involved with the Swedish community here, connecting more with neighbors and other horse owners, and so on.

But the lockdown forced me to sit more with my own thoughts, my own feelings and memories. It forced me to consider, not for the first time but again, that in this unpredictable life, the only sure thing is that I am me and I am where I am.

When I, as many other people, realized that this pandemic could wipe out countless people including myself, and completely change the living conditions for those who survived, it completely freed me from worrying about the small stuff. Or, rather, from considering the small stuff, because I’m not really a worrier. I just used to run a lot of what-if scenarios through my head. I used to be several steps ahead in my mind and have not only Plan B figured out. I would have backups to my backups.

Now I fully accept the unpredictability of life and that has freed up a lot of mental capacity and even time for me.

I have published three books and my blog has continued to grow. At this writing I have posted every single day for the last three weeks. The more I write, the more ideas I have. And my writing is inspired by my engagement with patients and the thinking about medicine they provoke in me. My clinic work informs my writing and my writing makes me a more curious clinician. I go to work thinking “what interesting things will I see today?”

How could I feel burnout when every clinic day is where I go for writing inspiration?

The pandemic has also, ironically, brought me closer to friends and family. Pre-pandemic, I felt too busy to connect, especially in person, never liked to talk on the phone, and I was not into social media. Now I text, call or chat often with my children. I FaceTime biweekly with my exchange student year brother from 50 years ago. I email and chat with cousins in Sweden and some of their children are in my Facebook feeds.

I am also more connected to my home. I take greater joy in doing the little fix-ups. In years past, my home improvements were on a grander scale. Now I do the little, low key things with just as much pride.

I only leave the property to work in my clinic (my second job is via telemedicine from my kitchen island) and to go shopping. The animals thrive on being all together and mild summer nights we all sleep in the barn with the top doors open. I love falling asleep to the sounds of summer, the snoozing of dogs and the chomping of hay.

I am so content with my life as a country doctor.

https://hansduvefeltmd.com/2021/08/28/burnout-not-even-close-video/amp/

Physicians are generally highly motivated to treat their patients well, both in terms of clinically well and in a nice manner. When they don’t do that, it isn’t usually because of personality disorders or character flaws, but because their jobs are robbing them of their enthusiasm and compassion.

Sometimes it is our own fault that we get burned out. I realized this ten years ago today (!) when I read Claire Burge’s post about burnout skills. We are, by nature and by training, fixers and problem solvers. Because healthcare these days is so dysfunctional, many of us feel like we should be heroes and do “the impossible” in spite of limited time, resources, support and so on. When we do that, we get external praise or praise ourselves, so we end up doing it again. That can be a vicious cycle of always fighting uphills battles, ultimately at our own expense.

But many times, we risk getting burned out even when we aren’t over-capitalizing our heroism. Sometimes the everyday, totally routine tasks put us at risk for burnout. A lot has been written about moral injury in healthcare as a cause for burnout. I agree that can be a dramatic contributing factor sometimes, but I firmly believe the most fundamental cause of burnout is that we, trained clinicians, diagnosticians and decision makers, are put in the position of public health nurses and data entry operators.

This is a terrible waste of a medical education and a sure way to job dissatisfaction and burnout.

It is frustrating for physicians to hear that everyone in their organization except them should work “at the top of their license”.

Think about it:

A patient is due for their ten year colonoscopy recall. The surgical clinic sends an electronic message asking the primary care physician to make a referral so the insurance will pay. It isn’t enough to respond or forward a “MAKE IT SO” command. No, the physician has to create a non-billable encounter, locate the correct diagnosis code for screening for malignant neoplasms of colon, Z12.11, click however many times it then takes to indicate the provider or clinic and send the order off to the referral coordinator.

Or:

A patient comes in for a sore thumb and is behind on all kinds of screenings and chronic care. Instead of devoting the visit to making the correct diagnosis, bacterial paronychia versus herpetic whitlow, and then treating it correctly, the physician is now held personally responsible for catching the patient up on things that could have been figured out and handled by an unlicensed staffer under the supervision of a public health type nurse working with practice wide protocols.

If there were “efficiency experts” analyzing what we do in healthcare, would they really recommend that the people with the highest degree of education do the most basic functions of data entry and checking off health screening protocols?

I find the priorities of modern primary care bewildering. I personally feel less burned out when I double book sick patients or stay late to take care of a complex new patient than when I am put in a position of bookkeeper. If I wanted to be an accountant or a public health nurse, I would have gone to school for that.

The Counterintuitive Concept of Burnout Skills