Thoughts on Burnout and Waste in Healthcare by a Great Mind in Medicine

I recently had a conversation with Dr. Rob Bessler, CEO of Honest Health and founder of Sound Physicians (full disclosure: Sound Physicians is my employer). I wanted to glean his wisdom on healthcare, the healthcare system, and the future of how we care for patients. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and the conversation is linked below.

The topic of burnout, which is a huge issue among physicians and other clinicians today, came up, and he had great insight into the issue:

"Burnout doesn't happen because you work hard. It happens when you don't feel empowered to fix what's broken, or you feel helpless...and a cog in a wheel."

That is so true. His whole point of founding Sound Physicians, and now leading Honest Health, is to create a practice physicians and other clinicians can be proud of. I can personally attest to that fact with Sound. We are the largest critical care group in the country, and we definitely are very proud of the excellent work we all do every day taking care of critical illness.

He also had this to say about burnout:

"Burnout happens when you feel like you have to cut corners in one part of your life to do the other part. If you feel like you're not able to give it all to your patients because you've got a lot going on at home...or you can't give it all at home because of the demands at work, that's where it starts to feel untenable."

Again, such a wise statement, and I could not agree more. That is why I do my best, and try to instill this in the trainees with whom I work, that we need to do everything we can to learn all of the efficiencies of our EMR and other systems so that, at the end of our shift, we can (in my words) "get the F@&^ out." I podcasted about this:

Our conversation also touched upon money in healthcare. We are, as a country, running out of money for healthcare. So, from where is the new money going to come? Fixing waste in healthcare, according to Dr. Bessler. How can I, as a critical care doctor, fix waste? Here is what he said:

"It's making sure the right patients are getting the care...life is a terminal illness...and making sure families have those difficult conversations [about goals of care] in advance."

I do this every single day as a critical care physician, and it makes me feel better that I am - in my own way, one patient at a time - working to fix some of the problems of our healthcare system.

It was a great conversation, and I invite you to listen to the entire conversation here: