By: Steve Moberg
Chief Operating Officer at Team Care Medicine, LLC

In the on-going battle to combat physician burnout, many hospital administrators and / or physician group leaders desiring to help, face the dilemma of adding yet more costs to an operation likely already struggling to turn a profit. In other cases, when administration is not providing the help, many exasperated doctors are paying for a scribe out of their own pocket.

The burnout issue is real and hiring a scribe to help with the heavy EHR documentation burden is becoming a common approach to solving it. A few years ago, the College of Medical Scribe Specialists predicted 100,000 scribes would be employed by 2020. With the Covid Pandemic, it is hard to tell exactly where the number stands today but the bottom line is it is a fast-growing solution. At about $15 per hour (a rough national average ) the annual expense with benefits can reach $25,000 to $35,000. So desperate is the situation, they add this expense with no guarantees of financial returns sufficient to pay for it. Yes, a scribe will bring some relief from EHR documentation, but the resulting productivity gains are mixed. Some doctors see a 6%-8% (the high end of the range) productivity lift, however, a 2019 $480,000 scribe model pilot at St. Charles Medical Group in Bend, Oregon was scrapped because the “modest” productivity gains (only ½ a patient visit added per day) were insufficient to pay for the scribes.  For about the same cost, administrators could upgrade to a more powerful solution that has been proven to boost physician productivity by 20%-40% or higher. That kind of productivity gain will easily pay for an additional MA being added to the team in lieu of a scribe. In this article, we will compare a Team Care Assistant (usually an MA trained in the use of the Team Care Medicine Model) to the use of a typical medical scribe. We will evaluate what they do and the benefits each provides.

What is a Medical Scribe?

A medical scribe is quite simply a person that interfaces with the Electronic Health Record (EHR) during a patient visit freeing the doctor to focus on the patient.  In most situations they require no specific certification or formal training to perform these duties. Candidates that possess soft skills like good listening, good communications, computer (typing) skills as well as some knowledge of human anatomy and medical terminology have an advantage. A high school diploma is a requirement and some background or courses in medicine is a benefit. Typically, a pre-med student is a good candidate however eventually they will move on so turnover may be an issue. A certification program  is also available from the American Healthcare Documentation Professionals Group. In most cases, the medical scribe is not in the exam room independent of the physician other than to perhaps room the patient and collect a few vital measurements (temperature, blood pressure, etc.). Lastly, they are not nurses, or even MAs, so there are functions they cannot do which limits their versatility in the practice.

What is a Team Care Medicine TCA?

A Team Care Assistant (TCA) is usually a Medical Assistant (MA) or less often a Nurse (LPN or RN) trained by Team Care Medicine to execute a patient visit using the Team Care Medicine Model. The TCA is with the patient throughout the patient visit.  They greet the patient and begin their 15-step process (fewer steps for an urgent visit) of interviewing the patient to capture all the patient’s medical information including the use of template driven questions about the chief complaint. Once all the patient’s medical information has been collected and updated in the EHR, the TCA notifies the physician, and the physician enters the exam room. The 5-15 minutes of data collection is then presented in a 2-3 minute crisp, data packed presentation to the physician in front of the patient. After presentation, the TCA then performs the role of a scribe, documenting any additional questions of the provider and answers of the patient. They also document any physical exam findings as well as the diagnosis and treatment plan of the physician in the EHR. Once the doctor has completed explaining the treatment plan to the patient, the doctor is free to exit the exam room and leave the TCA to again go over the treatment plan, perform any patient education and close the visit. See the following diagram of the Team Care Medicine visit flow.

How is the TCA Superior to a Medical Scribe?

There are meaningful differences between a scribe and a TCA in the work they perform, the satisfaction they bring to patients and in the superior financial benefit they produce making the TCA a much more valuable addition to the team than a scribe.

Work they perform:

The scribe is generally in the exam room only when the physician is in the exam room. The TCA, as outlined above works independent of the physician during portions of the visit. This is where the significant time savings occurs. A scribe does not collect the patient’s information beyond vitals, nor do they present this data to the physician. A Scribe cannot perform medical procedures or screenings (such as for depression) because they have no medical training. A TCA on the other hand can perform these tasks.  A Scribe does not do patient education or review the plan of the provider or close the visit allowing the doctor to slip out sooner, however, a TCA does all these things. A scribe does not take calls from patients with questions about their visit while the TCA fields many of the after-visit patient calls, protecting the physician from work that could easily be done by someone else. A TCA also helps set patient expectations such as helping to keep an urgent visit to just one issue or to let the patient with a list of 10 items know that the doctor will be made aware of them all but may only be able to evaluate 2 today and that an additional appointment(s) may be needed to cover the rest. A scribe does not engage in anything like this. Finally, the TCA working with the physician as a team just gets more done and it is done more efficiently, just like an OR Nurse helps the surgeon inside the operating room. All these differences add up to be significant benefits to the doctors and to the patients throughout the year. The benefits of a scribe are limited because the scope of work they perform is narrower than a TCA’s. See Table-1 For a summary comparison of the differences between a TCA and a Scribe.

The Patient Satisfaction They Deliver

With all the tasks on the plate of a primary care doctor working alone during a patient visit, it is easy for a patient to walk out the door at the end of the visit wondering if the doctor was really listening to them. When they hear the TCA crisply deliver their story to the physician and realize all the data points associated with their care, they know they have been heard. When the doctor explains the treatment plan and then the TCA repeats it and reviews the entire visit, they leave with a better understanding of the plan and what the doctor is asking them to do. Additionally, a 2019 ASHP Survey showed patients are less likely to ask questions about the care plan when they feel the providers are stressed and need to move on. They would more likely ask their questions to the TCA as they feel the TCA is more on their level. When they feel like they truly have a care team looking after them, it is very patient satisfying, and they view it all as better care.

The Financial Benefit They Produce

The TCA is there to significantly increase the efficiency of the physician by doing ALL non-physician work. It takes 2.5 TCAs for a physician to use the Team Care Medicine Model on 100% of the day’s patient visits. Most offices already have 1 to 1.5 clinical assistants per provider. Therefore, usually just 1 additional MA needs to be hired to round out the team. While the doctor and TCA #1 are in Exam Room #1 with Patient #1, TCA #2 is in Exam Room #2 with Patient #2 collecting all their relevant medical information and setting the table for the doctor to enter. When the doctor goes into Exam Room #2 with TCA #2 and Patient #2, TCA #1 wraps up the visit with Patient #1 and then begins the visit for Patient #3. See Diagram-2 depicting the provider hourly workflow.

This “dance” is repeated all day with the doctor going from exam room to exam room doing just the work that only they can do. The TCM Model flow also creates natural gaps throughout the day providing doctors a few minutes to knock out an item or two on their task list resulting in less work at the end of the day before heading home. The ability of a TCA to work independent of the doctor produces the big productivity boost over the scribe option.  Otherwise, the patient visits are accomplished serially with the doctor and the Scribe doing each together. The TCA typically delivers a 20-40% productivity gain in visit volumes with similar gains in the amount of work they accomplish as a team during the visit (Work RVUs). They help the doctor see more patients and get more done during the patient visit. With similar costs (See Table-2) you get much more bang for your buck with a TCA as opposed to a Scribe (See Table-3).

Conclusion

A Team Care Medicine TCA paired with a motivated doctor looking for a solution to burnout while desiring to maintain the highest level of care for their patients is an overall more powerful and efficient solution than a medical scribe model. Administrators hesitating to add more expense to their primary care offices should have great confidence that they can now add the needed help and that doctors can generate enough additional revenue to more than cover the added expense.

The Cost to Patients of Physician Burnout: It Is Much Worse Than You Think!

The Human Cost of Physician Burnout: It’s Worse Than You Think

By now, nearly all medical executives understand that their physicians are burning out at an alarming rate. However, very few grasp the full economic cost to their system. When a physician resigns, the replacement recruiting costs and the direct opportunity costs of missed patient visits are fairly obvious, but these account for just half of the overall financial impact to the system. Early retirement causes an expensive ripple effect which is often overlooked. And for the burned out physicians that have not yet quit, the malpractice risks to the system are substantial. In the context of primary care, these elements are explained and quantified below.  We conclude that a burned out primary care physician creates an actuarial cost of increased malpractice risk of $37K per year and that the early retirement of a primary care physician triggers a loss in excess of $1.0MM to the system. The assumptions, sources, and calculations behind these conclusions can be found in this Excel spreadsheet.

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Of course, this analysis still omits the human side of burnout, which will be discussed in a future article.

Burnout in a nutshell

Burnout manifests in physical and emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a reduced sense of personal accomplishment. Sadly, this has become a nationwide phenomenon, affecting upwards of 44% of physicians.

The undisputed drivers of physician burnout are the EHR and related non-physician work. Physicians find themselves staring at the computer screen instead of engaging with their patients face to face. As documentation requirements for billing, for compliance, and for meaningful use standards continue to climb, their take-home work (e.g. “pajama time”) consumes their evenings. As a result, their personal lives suffer and work becomes all-consuming. 

Burnout creates medical errors and increased malpractice risk

Sadly, when a physician begins to experience burnout, patient health is jeopardized. The 2019 Medscape Survey revealed 26% of depressed doctors say they are less careful when completing the visit documentation and 14% said they are making errors they wouldn’t ordinarily make. 

At TCM, we have encountered burned out physicians running up to 6 weeks behind in closing their charts! For medical malpractice trial attorneys this circumstance is a “dream come true”, making the line of questioning about chart accuracy an easy path to large jury awards.

Survey results in a recent Mayo Clinic Proceedings article suggest a burned out doctor is 120% more likely to make a medical error than a doctor that is not. Not only does this jeopardize patient wellbeing, it also substantially elevates the risk of malpractice lawsuits. We calculate the actuarial risk at an incremental $37K per year per burned out doctor. Though most systems provide malpractice insurance for their physicians, these incremental claims translate into higher premiums and higher deductibles that hit the bottom line. 

Burnout drives attrition, which is more expensive than you think

Direct Hiring Expense

Replacing a physician is a costly and time-consuming endeavor. Recruiter fees typically run one-third of base salary, whether an external cost or an internal overhead charge. A typical signing bonus is 15% of base salary. When training and legal costs are included, we see $161K in direct hiring expenses.

Direct Revenue Opportunity Cost

The loss of a tenured primary care physician leads to significant direct revenue loss as the panel disperses and patients must see another provider for their care. The direct revenue loss can be split into two phases.

First, while the position remains open, there is an obvious loss of revenue. In most cases, TCM has seen other providers in the practice shouldering one-third of the visits that would otherwise have been taken by the lost physician (adding to their own burnout risk). The remaining two-thirds is simply lost revenue. With primary care docs increasingly scarce, we see a typical recruiting period of roughly 6 months from day of resignation to first day of work for the replacement. The direct loss of revenue during the replacement hiring period averages $161K, during which time overhead charges continue to accrue. 

Second, even after the position is filled, the new physician typically cannot restore the full lost panel on Day One. Instead, they ramp up to full capacity over a 2-year period, operating with a 30% smaller panel in Year 1 and a 15% smaller panel in Year 2. The direct loss of revenue during the ramp up period for the new physician, compared to the lost physician practicing at full capacity, is $193K.

Thus, between the replacement hiring period and the replacement ramp up period, the direct revenues lost by the system add up to $354K.

Referral Revenue Opportunity Cost

When contemplating the cost of a lost physician and the merits of investing in physician wellbeing, corporate finance teams often overlook the lost referral revenues when a physician resigns. Here, too, the costs are borne during both the replacement hiring period and during the replacement ramp up period.  ReferralMD reports that, after accounting for referral leakage, the average physician generates $672K per year in referral revenue to their system. During the replacement hiring period, this translates into $224K in missed revenues, even after accounting for some incremental visit volumes for the other physicians that retained one third of the panel. Likewise, during the replacement ramp up period, the system loses referral revenues of $302K. Combined, $526K of downstream referral revenues are lost by the specialists in the system when a primary care provider burns out and quits.

Where to from here?

When a burned out physician finally quits, it costs the system $1,042K after all the costs enumerated above are tallied up. And prior to quitting, the physician costs the system an extra $37K year-in and year-out in elevated malpractice risk. Investing against burnout is not only the right thing to do, it’s the rational thing to do.

Against a panoply of half-measures and flawed approaches, one solution stands out as an empirically-proven solution to burnout. The TCM Model is gaining traction nationwide and has been proven to significantly reduce or completely eliminate physician overtime (often referred to as “pajama time”). Survey results from TCM clients consistently show significant gains in provider satisfaction as the provider is freed from the myriad administrative tasks that weigh them down and enabled to focus on the patient face-to-face again. Numerous physicians that have deployed the TCM Model have put off planned retirements to practice longer and have cancelled plans to move to a concierge practice, saving their systems millions.

The TCM Model was developed by Dr. Peter Anderson in Yorktown, Virginia. Prior to developing the TCM Model in his practice, he was one of the 383,250 doctors totally burned out, frustrated and hating medicine. Once perfected, the TCM Model allowed him to triple his revenues, become the highest revenue producing doctor in his hospital system, and increase daily visit volume from 18 patients per day to 35 patients per day. The best part, though, was completing his charts before leaving the office so he could go home with nothing to do but enjoy his family time and relax.    

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COVID-19 – Expanding Telehealth

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All across the US, well-meaning administrators seeking solutions to physician burnout are turning to Team-Based Care (TBC) Models. Few understand that TBCs were not created for the purpose of combating physician burnout or restoring joy in medicine. Rather, they were developed in response to new payment models that incentivize gains in the overall health of the patient. 

According to the Agency for Healthcare Research in Quality (AHRQ), “the primary goal of [Team-Based Care] is to optimize the timely and effective use of information, skills, and resources by teams of healthcare professionals for the purpose of enhancing the quality and safety of patient care”. While admirable and important, the primary intended beneficiary of TBC Models is the patient, not the physician.  

Team-Based Care Misses the Mark

The “team” in Team-Based Care refers to the primary care provider in addition to a host of adjacent healthcare professionals, such as care coordinators, triage nurses, pharmacists, and behavioral health professionals. For patients with complex health needs, coordination among these various providers is critical to good outcomes. However, when it comes to the mental well-being of the primary care provider, the TBC exacerbates the problem by adding more collaboration tasks and communication requirements to an already overwhelming workload.  

A host of evidence points to excessive administrative burden and EHR data entry tasks as the primary drivers of physician burnout. Providers report that they spend much of each visit typing on the keyboard rather than looking the patient in the eye. Most cannot keep up with their charts during clinic hours, but instead try to catch up in the evening, depriving them of rest and a personal life.

Any cure for physician burnout must involve relieving the provider of a meaningful portion of this administrative burden, allowing them to focus on the patient and on the actual practice of medicine for which they were trained. Such assistance must come inside the exam room, where the history is collected, the exam is documented, and the charts are updated. With its focus on an outside the exam room team, TBC is barking up the wrong tree.

Scribes Fall Short in Team-Based Care Models

Many systems have turned to scribes as a mechanism to take the keyboard out of the hands of the providers, freeing them up in the exam room. While this approach clearly yields some benefits, it doesn’t fundamentally change the equation for the providers that still perform virtually the entire visit themselves. Schedule delays and long hours remain a problem, as the scribe is little more than a “human app” attached to the EHR, which still must be directed at all times by the provider.

Team Care Medicine Cures the Illness

In order to truly change the game for providers, they must be freed to focus exclusively on the parts of the patient exam that require someone with their level of training. Everything else must be delegated to qualified team members. 

The Team Care Medicine (TCM) Model is built around this commonsense insight. In the TCM Model, the clinical assistants work ahead of and independent of the physicians. For instance, the clinical assistants gather all of the patient’s preliminary data, including chief complaint data, before the physician enters the exam room. They then present it to the physician verbally, in front of the patient, similar to how a resident presents a patient to their attending physician. The clinical assistants manage the EHR, including the capture of physical exam findings and recording of the diagnosis and treatment plan, thus freeing the physician to focus solely on the patient. The physician can then move on to the next patient, leaving the clinical assistant to provide patient education and close the visit. 

The TCM Model enables the provider to spend less time on each patient, and thus see more patients per day. In order to keep the provider fully occupied at this higher level of efficiency, most practices hire one additional MA per provider. The cost of this additional team member is easily covered by the 20-40% increase in provider productivity, and by improved provider satisfaction and retention as they re-engage personally with their patients during the exam and no longer take charts home in the evening.  

A Purely Logical Solution

The principal drivers of physician burnout are found inside the exam room, so any solution must also transform the process and responsibilities inside the exam room. While there are admirable goals and benefits to a Team-Based Care Model, healthcare leaders seeking a solution to physician burnout would do well to consider the commonsense and empirically validated approach: the TCM Model.

Physicians are burdened by an incredible amount of stress from not only their work but also from rising operating costs, new technology, increasing administrative burdens, and growing demands from patients. This takes an obvious toll on physicians and can lead to low-quality patient care, medical errors, and can cost the healthcare system billions of dollars every year. 

So, can anything be done to prevent physician burnout? 

Learn to spot the warning signs

Whether in yourself or in a coworker, it’s always a good idea to be able to identify the signs of burnout and determine where these signs cross the line between regular but manageable work stress and burnout. That’s where our previous article, What is Burnout, and the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) come into play. According to the MBI, there are three symptoms common among most physician burnout cases:

Emotional and physical exhaustion

Emotional and physical exhausting is the most common sign of burnout, which is when someone is worn out and depleted from work but unable to recharge during non-work hours. 

Depersonalization

Depersonalization is a symptom that often comes out in the form of cynicism, frustration, and a negative or callous attitude. Often, this is displayed in a physician’s sudden inability to connect with patients and constantly finding themselves blaming others. 

Reduced sense of accomplishment

During this stage of physician burnout, the physician starts to doubt their qualifications see themselves as incompetent. They’ve lost confidence in their skills as a physician and start to believe that patients would be better off not under their care. 

As you are watching for these signs, be mindful that physician burnout looks different in different physicians. For example, male physicians and female physicians display these signs in different ways. 

Sometimes, the constant discussion of burnout in healthcare becomes burnout in and of itself, giving physicians a sense of hopelessness in thinking that there’s no stop to this epidemic, that it’s an inevitable part of this job. But, there is a way to counter burnout and it starts with Team Care Medicine and restructuring the healthcare organization’s framework. It starts with deconstructing the various points of stress and instead promotes strategies that improve the organization’s balance. 

If you’re ready to learn how to do this within your own organization, sign up for one of our 30-minute live webinars. Within this time, you’ll learn the basics of our trademarked and proven TCM Model and understand the path to launching our program to fit your own organization.

Physician burnout is widely recognized as a challenge not only for physicians, their families, and their colleagues, but also for the US population that depends on access to engaged and effective healthcare providers. The World Health Organization recently defined burnout as 

“A syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions: 

1) Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion.

2) Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job.

3) Reduced professional efficacy. 

Burn-out refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.”  

Despite near-universal awareness, the problem is poorly quantified.

Measuring Burnout

Quantifying the prevalence and severity of burnout is inherently difficult. First, burnout is an internal experience that can only be described by the person suffering from it. Second, burnout is a continuum rather than a binary state.  

The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) is the most commonly used measure of physician burnout. The MBI delineates burnout according to three components: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment. However, the cutoff criteria of what constitutes burnout and where to delineate low, medium, or high severity is subjective and varies widely in academic literature.

Other measurement tools have emerged to improve upon the MBI, whether by framing some of the questions negatively or by addressing the high cost of the MBI materials. Alternative approaches include the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory, Oldenberg Burnout Inventory, Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), Stanford Professional Fulfillment Index, and the Well-Being Index.  

The vast array of diagnostic tools and cutoff points can be dizzying, but they all point to the same high-level conclusions:

#1 Burnout affects healthcare providers at higher rates than the overall population

In a 2014 study, approximately 54% of physicians reported at least 1 symptom of burnout, almost twice the rate of the general U.S. working population. Physicians explain that an heavy load of bureaucratic tasks and excessive work hours (especially take-home work) are the primary contributors to emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced job satisfaction.  After all, they “didn’t go to medical school in order to enter data in the EHR.”  

#2 Burnout affects primary care providers at higher rates than specialists

In an Archives of Internal Medicine article, researchers noted “substantial differences in burnout were observed by specialty, with the highest rates among physicians at the front line of care access (family medicine, general internal medicine, and emergency medicine).” Confirming this result year in and year out, the annual Medscape survey across 29 specialties consistently places Family Medicine and Internal Medicine in the top 5 for burnout and bottom 5 for happiest at work. 

#3 Burnout is reported at higher rates for women than men 

Among US physicians, women report burnout at 25% higher rates than men. Researchers note that women may be more likely to admit to psychological problems and seek help than men. Women also disproportionately assume childcare and family responsibilities, increasing the cost of challenges to work-life balance.

Healthcare executives must seek solutions to the root causes of burnout – excessive clerical tasks borne by the provider and the take-home work that results. Without a change, provider turnover will continue to climb and patient access will continue to erode.

Physician burnout has become a national epidemic with multiple studies proving that about half of all doctors suffer from at least one of the three common symptoms associated with this condition. Physician burnout negatively impacts quality of care, patient safety, physician and patient turnover rates, and patient satisfaction in addition to increasing the number of medical errors that have become common in the United States. According to a Mayo Clinic Proceedings study by Daniel Tawfik, MD, medical errors are responsible for 100,000 to 200,000 deaths each year. However, research connecting physician burnout to these errors is limited. 

Up until pretty recently, the most prevalent approach to reducing medical errors was to fix the workplace safety by adding in more checklists for physicians to complete and adding in “solutions” like yoga and breathing exercises for the physicians. Tawfik’s study shows that this is insufficient, comparable to placing a Bandaid over a large gash. Fixing these medical errors starts by addressing physician burnout, understanding what it is, how to identify it in yourself and your colleagues, and finding ways to prevent it. 

Defining Physician Burnout

An accurate comparison for physician burnout is that energy is like a bank account that can have a positive or negative balance. Every time a physician engages in the activities of their life and medical practice, he or she withdraws energy and the balance decreases. During times of rest and rebalance, energy is deposited, causing that balance to increase. The problem comes when it dips into a negative balance. The account doesn’t close; instead, energy is still spent (in this case working) despite the fact that the currency (energy) is, in fact, depleted. 

Burnout is a long-term stress reaction characterized by a series of symptoms we will later discuss that is a result of a constantly depleted energy account and with a negative balance over time. Yes, a physician can continue to function and work in this state but as only a shadow of the doctor that he or she is when the account has a positive balance. 

Signs & Symptoms of Physician Burnout

The industry-wide accepted standard for burnout diagnosis is the Maslach Burnout Inventory that was developed in the 1970s by Christina Maslach and her colleagues at the University of San Francisco. She described burnout as “an erosion of the soul caused by a deterioration of one’s values, dignity, spirit, and will.” The three distinct symptoms most commonly associated with physician burnout:

Symptom #1: Physical and Emotional Exhaustion

The physician is feeling both physically and emotionally drained, depleted, worn out, and unable to recover during non-working hours. This is by far the most common symptom of burnout and is the one most physicians identify with when taking burnout prevalence surveys. A thought process that the physician suffering from physical and emotional exhaustion may identify with is, “I’m not sure how much longer I can go on like this.”

Symptom #2: Depersonalization

When physicians display this symptom, it often comes in the form of cynicism, a need to vent about their patients or their job, and a negative or callous attitude. Doctors in this stage are feeling so emotionally drained that they are not emotionally available for their patients or anyone for that matter. 

Symptom #3: Reduced Sense of Personal Accomplishment

In this stage of physician burnout, you may begin to doubt the meaning and quality of your work and see yourself as incompetent. A piece of internal dialogue commonly associated with this symptom is thinking, “What does it matter? My work doesn’t really serve a purpose anyway,” or even, “I’m afraid that if I don’t change something, someone is going to get hurt and it’ll be all my fault.”  

Effects on patients, practice, and physicians

Physician burnout affects all parties involved: the physician’s patients, the practice, the physician’s family, and, of course, the physician him/herself. Physician burnout is directly linked to a series of unsavory consequences that you definitely want to keep out of your practice:

• Lower patient satisfaction due to poorer quality of care
• Higher physician and staff turnover
• Higher and more severe medical error rates and malpractice risks
• Physician alcohol and drug abuse and addiction
• Higher physician suicide rates

There is a higher risk of death by suicide for both female and male physicians relative to other professionals but goes widely underreported. 

Physician burnout fits with the old adage “death by 1,000 paper cuts.” It can happen slowly over time, each day and each task exacerbating the physician’s condition until it comes crashing down with a trigger like a lawsuit, a tragic circumstance in one’s personal life, a significantly damaging medical error, etc. If left untreated, physician burnout will only erode the mental health of doctors and threaten patient care. 

This is the first in a series of communications on productivity and its far-reaching effects on our individual futures and the future of healthcare. In upcoming blogs, we’ll examine the link between productivity and an effective medical home, discuss some of the impediments to greater productivity and then see what it looks like in the exam room.

The driving factor in lack of access

There’s always talk about improving access, but low productivity, the driving factor behind reduced access, doesn’t get much respect. It should. It’s estimated that 38 percent of primary care visits in 2015 were unnecessarily diverted from the PCP office to the ED, urgent care centers and retail clinics. That’s a lot of lost visits, to the detriment of the practice – and especially to the patient because fragmented, limited care is no substitute for the kind of cost-effective quality that comes with continuous, comprehensive care.

What’s to love about productivity?

Getting back to our love-hate relationship with productivity, the “love” part is a matter of economics. While there are some exceptions, compensation has historically been based on the number and intensity of services provided. Metrics and methodologies can vary, but for the most part, the more patients seen, the more the likelihood of financial success. Although we continue moving toward fee for outcome-based payment models and next-era indicators for productivity, the wRVU standard remains in place for the majority of employed physician and physician owner practices.

And what is it that we hate?

As it turns out, there’s a darker side to this straightforward work-pay relationship. For primary care providers who already feel maxed out, it’s the vision of the hamster wheel. You hear the word “productivity” and you think of an industrial age assembly line, complete a conveyor belt, bringing endless numbers of patients in and out of the exam room. This scenario may be a bit extreme, but a system that incentivizes volume without supplying support staff with the specific skills need in primary care exam rooms can end up creating a negative impact on the missions of preventive medicine, wellness, education and basic patient care itself.  As a result, productivity is not only distinct from, but may also be anathema to quality and service.

If that isn’t bad enough, increased productivity carries the threat of overwhelming the already fragile work-life balance that providers often struggle to maintain. That’s why discussions of productivity can create concerns in the areas of both professional and personal satisfaction.

Why greater productivity is a necessity

In recent blogs, we’ve talked about how pursuing the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Triple Aim remains critical for maximizing overall health system performance and a reliable constant in the ever-changing map of healthcare. We’ve also discussed the value to primary care providers of capturing more acute care patients who might otherwise seek to have their medical needs met at retail clinics or urgent care centers due to limited access at their provider’s practice. The common element in both of these objectives and the most effective way to achieve this improved productivity.

However, without a corresponding increase in the kind of efficiency that supports productivity – and in turn leads to greater access – our ability to attain the Triple Aim, along with our hopes for meeting the needs of acute care patients will never reach fruition. And as we will discuss in the next blog, neither will our ability to bring the medical home to an effective reality.