Physician, Medical Doctor Or Healthcare Providers: That Is The Question!

Some Recon that Labeling Physicians As Providers Coincides With Devaluation Of Their Profession. If True, So Who Is To Blame?

Illumination publication initially publicized this article on Medium!

Physicians take pride in what they do. That is merely because they spend decades of their valuable life to earn the title of Medical Doctor. However, that is changing!

Whether we like it or not, the tasks and roles associated with the medical profession are subject to radical reform and modification. One can correlate such a transformation to the recent initiatives by healthcare leaders and policymakers. But, ironically, most said leaders and policymakers are neither physicians nor have any idea how the medical practice works. Some may argue about the validity of what I just mentioned, which I intend to return to later in this essay.

Irrespective of who, why, and how healthcare leaders intend to transition the physicians' role, almost every effort they make seems to point towards establishing health equity, lower healthcare costs, and engaging patients in their medical care. But, one can hardly outline a reasonable initiative to reduce physician burden and incorporate them in the decisions related to the current healthcare crisis.

In revisiting physician roles by the bureaucrats, specific titles have made their way into their administrative documents. Those are designations like "primary care physicians and healthcare providers." These headers don't point to the expertise and ability of a clinician per se. But instead, it serves as an instrument to revalue and devalue specific skill sets and tasks for certain medical specialties while raising the value of other non-physician skill sets to clinical levels that would otherwise not fall within disease prevention and health promotion.

Indeed, titles such as primary care and Healthcare provider are the bureaucratically driven headers given to physicians to force them to perform additional tasks like collecting social determinants of health, data entry chores, and engaging patients in their care for smaller reimbursement.

The Title Of Healthcare Provider Lowers The Physician's Appointment To Data Entry Positions, But Who Is To Blame?

Not long ago, I encountered a piece by Kevin MD titled "Physicians did not go to provider school." Within the content, the author touches on physician roadmap particulars of what they must endure to earn their degree. And that is why they should be valued because they spend long years and costly schooling to get a position to care for patients.

Indeed, physicians accept enormous and unconditional responsibility once they take the healer role. They spend long unpaid hours and take on a perfectionist perspective.

The author also quotes :

“But once health systems convince everyone that we are all the same by refusing to call us physicians, one of us becomes unnecessary.

Increasingly I’ve seen physicians post about physicians being fired and replaced with NPs or PAs. How could this be happening? How could physicians become so devalued that they are fired and replaced?”

Then follows:

“The answer is we have become devalued by being called providers.”

I could not agree more that we do, indeed, deserve better. However, we must also accept that physicians are a culture of complainers with an innate Black Hat thinking. But, even if it has worked well in their clinical life, the "Black Hat attitude of physicians" has not worked to their benefit outside their exam room.

Physicians need to claim the technology of their domain. They generally decline to accept that they need to be more than a clinician, just like a civil engineer or a Banker who has control over designing and validating their information technology.

Most healthcare leaders are administrators with business experiences who have little or no insight into what transpires in patient exam rooms.

What was said, along with the politics of licensing and certification, decades of partisan control of scholars through licensing practices, the play of economic rent to exploit talents and skills has created a hotbed for bureaucrats to lay their monopoly seeds to control the economy, and the public health!

Indeed:

” Knowledge and skills are dominant traits of every citizen, thus having control over them is defined into decreeing and harnessing the sovereignty of the scientific disciples, against the honor of the populace.”

Then again, who is to blame?!

Physicians are utterly declining to be software designers and validators of their discipline, yet they are dissatisfied with the electronic health records they are forced to use. That is knowing that technology is here to stay. Therefore, they also need to accept that if they don't remove their industry from the hands of non-medicals, they will eventually end up working like robots for robots , also called "primary care physicians or healthcare providers."

Indeed, a healthcare provider's responsibility differs from what they can perform independently in clinical settings. But instead, it entails data collection, entry, and responding to the automated reminders of the practice management software in their office.

So, why should the insurance industry respect physicians by dubbing them other than "Providers" when physicians are utterly negligent about their value and responsibility?

Isn't it time to take control of 21st-century diagnostic instruments and exam tools in addition to Stethoscopes and ophthalmoscopes?

It may be time for physicians to step up by accepting their roles and responsibilities before a non-physician assigns them a part they don't appreciate!

And maybe Providers need to get off the slippery slope before it is too late and be physicians again and not expect "corporate-nurtured bureaucrats" to give them the respect and value they deserve. Because, politically, strategically, and tactically it is not feasible for leaders at the head of corporate cartels to call physicians other than Providers.

References

1. KevinMD. com. "Physicians Did Not Go to Provider School," September 8, 2022. https://www.kevinmd.com/2022/09/physicians-did-not-go-to-provider-school.html.
2. TABRIZ, A. Politics of Licensing and Certification | by Dr. ADAM TABRIZ | DataDrivenInvestor. Medium, October 25, 2021. https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/politics-of-licensing-and-certification-5e341100153f.
3. Six Thinking Hats — Wikipedia. Six Thinking Hats — Wikipedia, August 1, 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Thinking_Hats.
4. TABRIZ, D" A. Medical Societies and Their Flop of a Century-Old Quest | by Dr. ADAM TABRIZ | Data Driven Investor, Medium, October 21, 2019. https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/medical-societies-and-their-flop-of-a-century-old-quest-2734c9c90f72.
5. TABRIZ, A. "Economy, Monopoly, and Professional Licensing | by Dr. ADAM TABRIZ | Data Driven Investor, Medium, June 18, 2022. https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/economy-monopoly-and-professional-licensing-ebf567132e65.
6. TABRIZ, A." Economic Rent- The Influential Switch over Talent and Skill | by Dr. ADAM TABRIZ | Data Driven Investor, Medium, February 9, 2020. https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/economic-rent-the-influential-switch-in-excess-of-talent-and-skill-3cf884954a64.
7. TABRIZ, A.Physicians: The Culture of Complainers | by Dr. ADAM TABRIZ | Data Driven Investor. Medium, November 19, 2021. https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/physicians-the-culture-of-complainers-9d0ee4d564e.

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