Forget Angry Birds and other mobile apps that do a great job of helping you waste time. And set aside for now the apps that help you find information and practice clinical medicine more efficiently. It was only a matter of time before mobile apps would be developed that can actually help you prevent physician burnout. Here are my two favorite free mobile apps to help you lower stress and create ...

Read more...

"Disruptive physician" is one of the most misused terms in healthcare these days. In many organizations, those two words have become the c-suite's trump card to quash any physician resistance to new administrative programs. These programs are often have purely financial motives or are a brazen attempt to dump additional tasks on the physicians with no regard for their workload or stress levels. The doctor’s legitimate concerns about quality of care ...

Read more...

In these early days of pay for performance (P4P) reimbursement, as the size of your paycheck begins to reflect your patient satisfaction scores, let's have a frank discussion about three important topics all healthcare providers and organizations must understand going forward.

  1. How your performance will be measured
  2. How to get the highest patient satisfaction scores and be a happier doctor at the same time
  3. The first step to improving performance (in a healthy ...

    Read more...

Doctors are the canaries in the coal mine of medicine Back in the day, coal miners always carried a canary with them in a small cage whenever they would go down in the mine. The canary is a very talkative bird, always singing and tweeting in a constant background noise. Canaries have one more characteristic important to a miner. When there is bad air in the mine, the canary's sensitive lungs will cause ...

Read more...

Improve your work life balance: A schedule hack for doctors In this article I will show you a push button shortcut you can use to quickly create more work-life balance, no matter how busy your practice and your life feels at the moment. When it comes to creating balance between your medical career and your life, there is a simple rule in play. The strongest structure wins. When we are talking about ...

Read more...

I believe the projected shortage of physicians caused by  the Affordable Care Act will drive primary care into two opposite tracks. Each is a distinct and logical response to the patient overload and each points out gaping holes in our medical education that must be addressed. The Association of American Medical Colleges  estimates that there will be a shortage of 63,000 doctors by 2015 and 130,600 by 2025 in ...

Read more...

Is the placebo effect something that demands the presence of a living human - or can we program it into a cell phone app? What happens to healthcare if we can? I must admit I have always been fascinated by the concept of placebos. You give a research subject with a documented medical condition a sugar pill - and they get better. They heal themselves despite the fact they have not ...

Read more...

The most common complaint about physicians on the Internet is, “They didn’t listen to me.” You were sitting in the office and the doctor was physically present in the room, but they weren’t all there. Even worse is when the doctor doesn’t try to understand what you are going through. Sometimes it can seem like they didn’t even care. Most of us take for granted that we are the center of the ...

Read more...

Burnout is a constant threat for physicians. Research consistently shows an average of 1 in 3 doctors suffering from symptomatic burnout on any given office day. In my work with over stressed and burned out doctors, I have found that most of us work way too hard being the superhero to our staff, patients and families -- and don’t have any fun at all. It doesn’t have to be ...

Read more...

One of the big practice challenges most physicians face is a frustrating gap in our leadership skills. We step out of residency and are instantly installed as the leader of a multidisciplinary team charged with delivering the highest quality care to our patients. This new leadership role can be daunting. We are prepared to diagnose and treat, but what about all the other questions that come our way?  At times It ...

Read more...

2 Pages

Trending