Unplug

Sick care has turned into a data industry that takes care of patients. EMRs, remote sensing, artificial intelligence, patient portals, patient reported outcomes and an expanding menu of electronic shiny new objects has caused technofatigue and burnout. In most cases, it has not improved productivity.

Are you suffering from email apnea?

Sick care workers are not alone.

To help salespeople meet ever-changing customer needs, sales leaders have spent years driving a “just one more” strategy — asking sellers to learn one more skill, master one more technology, or adopt one more tool in the hopes of closing just one more deal.

In the process, well-intentioned sales leaders designed a role that is simply too complex for most salespeople. In a recent Gartner survey of 501 B2B sellers, only 25% strongly agree they complete all tasks assigned to them while also meeting company standards of high quality.

Sales leaders’ solution? Technology. And yet, almost half of sellers feel overwhelmed by the number of technologies needed to do their work. This isn’t a mere annoyance — it’s the difference between hitting revenue targets and not. According to our research, sellers who feel overwhelmed by technology are 43% less likely to meet quota than non-overwhelmed sellers.

It's time to revisit Osleriana.

Sir William Osler: Science & the Art of Medicine - YouTube

Digital wabi sabi is a solution. Wabi sabi 侘び寂び is a Japanese concept that often has foreigners scratching their heads in bafflement. The first part of the expression - wabi - refers to the bitter-sweet pleasure of being alone. It refers to the serenity that comes from detaching yourself from society, and its endless striving for wealth and status.

The second element is sabi, a reference to the noble veneer that the passage of time lends to people and objects. It asserts that while time affects people no less than it does objects, the essence of both remains the same.

Wabi sabi is not the only idea coming from Japan. When Kohei Saito decided to write about “degrowth communism,” his editor was understandably skeptical. Communism is unpopular in Japan. Economic growth is gospel. Mr. Saito has tapped into what he describes as a growing disillusionment in Japan with capitalism’s ability to solve the problems people see around them, whether caring for the country’s growing older population, stemming rising inequality or mitigating climate change.

Digital minimalism is one such philosophy, which requires that you identify what values and activities are priorities in your life, determine which digital tools promote those priorities, and implement constraints for using these tools to maximize their benefits and minimize their harm and distraction.

The case for digital minimalism includes:

1. More time with patients
2. More time with yourself and your friends and family
3. Reducing burnout
4. Lower cost
5. Psychic satisfaction
6. Less employee turnover
7. Regain control of your time
8. Reducing the clutter in your life, including all those charging cords
9. Less anxiety about finding a power source (no wonder you won't buy an electric car)
10. Minimizing information and cognitive overload
11. Eliminating the addictive and harmful effects of social media
12. The soothing, comforting effect of using a flip phonehttps://open.spotify.com/episode/6tfnjUGrszzqwR713hBGU2?si=uTtyvh9bTPG41i83vEjAMw

Deloitte Global predicts that smartphones—the world’s most popular consumer electronics device, expected to have an installed base of 4.5 billion in 20221—will generate 146 million tons of CO2 or equivalent emissions (CO2e) in 2022.2?This is less than half a percent of the 34 gigatons of total CO2e?emitted globally in 2021, but it is still worth trying to reduce.3

The bulk of these emissions, 83% of the total, will come from the manufacture, shipping, and first-year usage of the 1.4 billion new smartphones forecast to be shipped in 2022.4 Usage-related emissions from the other 3.1 billion smartphones in use during 2022 will generate an additional 11%, and the remainder will come from refurbishing existing smartphones (4%) and end-of-life processes (1%),5 including recycling

A first step should be to prevent unsafe and ineffective sick care information and communication technologies from getting to market. We are already inundated with too much snake oil.

Going forward, CMS faces many challenges, perhaps foremost among them navigating a political landscape fraught with questions about government intrusion into the practice of medicine and long-standing concerns about barriers to innovation and “rationing” of health care. Still, like it or not, CMS has already become a major HTA (health technology assessment) body, which is especially notable given the relative absence of HTA elsewhere in the federal government and historical opposition to the idea. It is reasonable for Medicare to consider carefully the evidence underlying the technologies it pays for. Several steps could improve the agency’s prospects for success.

It's time to unplug most sick care information and communication technologies. You'll like how it makes you feel.

Arlen Meyers MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Substack and Editor of Digital Health Entrepreneurship