ICYMI, the nationwide Physician Misery Index increased from 3.78 to nearly 4 out of 5 since 2015* despite increasing awareness of the pervasiveness of physician burnout

89 percent of physicians say the “business and regulation of healthcare” has changed the practice of medicine for the worse
80 percent say they are personally at risk for burnout
96 percent report they have witnessed or experienced physician burnout impacts such as cynicism, severe stress and dissatisfied patients

At Geneia, we believe

• Physicians are a highly-valued, limited resource;
• The central tenant to design of workflows and tasks that involve physicians must be to minimize the overall effort expended by physicians;
• To the greatest extent possible, everything that can be done by someone other than a physician, in fact, should be;
• That other administrative and care team members are perfectly equipped, if given the right information and tools, to identify risk, coordinate care, manage open care opportunities, close care and coding gaps, motivate and engage patients, and perform record-keeping to maximize a return on quality, cost and revenue; and
• We must reserve physicians’ time for improving the patient relationship, diagnosis and treatment.

At Geneia, we’re committed to

• Measuring the satisfaction of physicians,
• Surveying the physicians who use our products annually to gauge changes in sentiment, 
• Working with those doctors to remedy their technology and analytics pain points, and 
• Sharing resources with health IT companies, health plans and physician organizations to make it easier to involve physicians in the design and implementation of health technology products and to measure and address physician satisfaction

• Download and use the Physician Health IT Satisfaction Survey. Once you take the survey, you can compare your results to the national averages. Likewise, healthcare organizations are invited to use the survey with their physicians. 
• Use our best practices for involving physicians in the selection of analytics platform. The best practices can be applied to any population health tool with physicians as the end users.

There’s more we all can – and should – do to improve physician satisfaction

• Ask your organization to commit to reducing commonly-accepted physician frustrations, such as improving EHR workflows to reduce physician data entry time, aka “pajama time.” 
• Identify and mitigate the social determinants of health of your patients and members. Research shows addressing patients’ social needs may also reduce physician burnout. So it’s good for patients and doctors.
• Watch the video series, Leveraging High-Tech Tools in the Fight Against Physician Burnout, and get inspired to take action at your organization.
• Get the Joy of Medicine pin and wear it. Just fill out our form and we’ll send you one. 
• Got other ideas to restore the joy of medicine? Tweet your ideas to me at @hslavoie and use the hashtag #joyofmedicine.

*Geneia LLC survey of 300 full-time physicians, 2018