Employer Healthcare Strategies

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You’re offering the best benefits you can, and your employees are still avoiding the doctor. Find out the most common barriers — and the potential solution that can dismantle them.

According to the Medscape Lifestyle Report 2016: Bias and Burnout, some of the major causes of physician burnout include: 1) too many bureaucratic tasks; 2) spending too many hours at work; 3) too many patient appointments in a day; 4) not enough income; and 5) just feeling like a cog in a wheel.

Physician burnout is a major concern for the industry and can lead to lower patient satisfaction and care quality; higher medical error rates and malpractice risk; higher physician and staff turnover; and physician substance abuse. Repeated studies have shown an average of 1 in 3 doctors suffer from symptomatic physician burnout on any given day. How can you tell if you are at risk for burnout? Here are three signs to look for:

Changes in healthcare are taking place at break neck speed. From clinical and technological advances, to financial and regulatory obligations, today’s physician are forced to adapt to transformational changes – fast. In recent years, physicians are navigating through a series of events that leave many feeling uncertain about the future. Such uncertainly is leading to unprecedented levels of stress, bias, and burnout. According to the 2016 Physicians Foundation’s Survey, physicians have had to adapt to several simultaneous changes in recent years, including:

• Expansion of health insurance coverage through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to include 20 million people and may soon be repealed and replaced by the Trump administration.
• Passage of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization ACT (MACRA), which will totally revamp how physicians are paid by Medicare, further moving payments from “volume” to “value.”
• Implementation of ICD-10, raising the number of disease classification codes physicians use from 14,000 to 68,000
• An ongoing physician shortage, projected by the Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) to create a deficit of up to 90,400 physicians by 2025.
• The “corporatization” of healthcare, including over $400 billion in merger activity in 2015 and approximately 100 hospital/health system consolidations.

Physicians are the key drivers of healthcare quality, setting the precedent to access and cost. With an ongoing physician shortage and nearly 50% of providers experiencing burnout, the outlook of healthcare in the United States continues to cause alarm. So what is a provider to do?

A NEW APPROACH TO PRIMARY CARE 

With the healthcare industry’s emphasis on volume, not value, many physicians are left feeling overworked, ineffective, and demoralized. It’s no wonder why 43% of physicians plan to cut-back on hours, retire, take a non-clinical job, switch to “concierge” medicine, or take other measures to bring back balance.

One branch of healthcare offering primary care providers greater flexibility and work-life balance are worksite clinics. Employers are taking wellness to new heights by investing in worksite clinics that focus on one thing: improving health. The result? Lower healthcare costs by improving employee health. Leading employer-sponsored healthcare offers physicians an opportunity to be the change agent they’ve always wanted to be.

As America's elderly population swells in number, the need for compassionate, patient-centered care is increasingly necessary. In order to serve tens of millions of elderly adults, formal service providers and facilities would need to change fundamentally, and increase in number by an enormous margin.

Instead, the personal health care industry seems to be accepting help from a non-traditional source: the informal caregiver.

The phrase "Uber of Healthcare" has been thrown around recently to describe some future healthcare bellweather which will disrupt the industry for the better.

What if Uber is already filling this role?

America has a physician shortage. By 2025, the shortfall is projected to total 90,000 fewer physicians than needed. This health crisis can be felt across the country, but is most acute in underserved rural areas.

While there are many partial solutions in the works, one may come from an unexpected source: immigration.

The American healthcare sector continues to be a target for cyber criminals. More than 2 Terabytes of patient data was swiped in 2015. The average incident costed almost $1 million to resolve.

Even though healthcare data continues to be vulnerable in some settings, modern data security measures do exist. Most healthcare systems are just too obsolete or underfunded to make use of them.

A proposed bill would transform the $130 Billion program, making psychiatric care much more available and affordable.

The bill passed the US House of Representatives with bi-partisan support, and now waits for the Senate to vote on it in the Fall.