Every week I run into a few articles that I feel are especially valuable, so each Monday I plan to share some of the best with you, my readers. I hope you find them helpful.
This week’s favorites include an example of how we are teaching new interns the wrong priorities, four workflow changes that cut burnout by 45%, proof that vacationing more is good for your health, and five ways to beat consumer addiction.
Happy reading!
Interns have a lot to learn before they become an attending. Dr. Fred N. Pelzman, who blogs at MedPage Today’s site Building the Patient-Centered Medical Home, points out in his KevinMD article, New doctors are prioritizing the wrong things, that new interns where he works begin their training with billing and compliance. This gives us a good picture about what the hospital thinks is most important for their doctors to learn. Billing takes precedence over patient care. Of course, capturing all the billing is what the EMR was designed for. Is that how physician training should begin? Should our new interns be learning to do the homecare forms themselves or should they be taking care of the patients and just ordering homecare; leaving hospital employees to take care of filling out the forms correctly? I think we are heading in the wrong direction. Too much medicine to learn and not enough time to learn it to be messing with busy work. What do you think?
We could all use a little help in preventing burnout and Sara Berg pointed out a few proven ways to decrease burnout in These 4 workflow changes help cut burnout by 45% on the AMA’s Physician Health page. If you are looking for a few tips to improve the burnout rate at your office, take a look at this article.
Want to decrease your chance of getting metabolic syndrome from 47% to 1%, then take more vacations. Colleen Killingsworth wrote a nice piece for Fox 5 New York called Vacationing more reduces risk of metabolic syndrome, heart disease, stroke and diabetes, study says. The article is a summation of a recent JAMA network published study that you can read here. We can all use a few tricks to achieve better health. This one also will likely reduce your rate of burnout as well, a twofer.
One of the biggest obstacles in reaching financial independence is Consumption of stuff. Why do we spend so much? And why do we spend money we don’t have? The Physician Philosopher blames it all on dopamine in his recent article Consumer Addiction and 5 Ways to Beat It. Implementing his ideas will speed up your arrival date of financial independence. After you read it, you should read The One Statement Every Doctor Must Learn. You can beat back the monster of consumerism.
I hope you enjoy these articles as much as I did. I look forward to updating you again next week with a few more articles I find especially interesting.
