Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 3/13/17

Even though I haven’t had my post-op clearance visit, I returned to patient care work today. Since I only see patients part time, our medical liability insurance is in the form of a “slot policy,” where multiple physicians share a single policy. Although it’s a cost-effective way to handle coverage for part-time physicians, it can make scheduling complex since you have to avoid exceeding the allowable hours for each physician on the policy.

My partners have been covering my shifts and I know it’s been a strain.Since I’m theoretically being cleared tomorrow, I figured I’d work. It helped that I was scheduled to work at one of our less-busy sites, so I wasn’t too worried about being physically overwhelmed.

No good deed goes unpunished, though, because I was greeted with a partial EHR outage. It was very similar to the recent Amazon Web Services outage in that we could document and scan images but couldn’t view any images or letters. The vendor did promise to keep us posted, but after 10 hours we had heard nothing.

Fortunately, we were able to keep documenting and seeing patients, but it’s annoying that they didn’t at least follow up every couple of hours with a status update. Overall, it was a slow day and I had brought some other work to do if things were quiet. Usually that’s a guarantee that you’ll stay busy, but not so much today.

My backup plan was to do some continuing education and watch some of the “on demand” sessions from HIMSS17, but they’re not posted yet. I instead started to enter my CME credits, and was reminded that the system is less user-friendly than I hoped. First, when you set up your transcript of courses you want to claim credit for, there are some usability challenges. When you select a class, it blanks the screen, forcing you to re-select the day every time you select a class. Second, you can’t select more than one class per time block. Once you select a course in that block, the rest of the options disappear. That makes sense for a live-only conference, but not so much for a conference where you can also earn CME from on-demand sessions.

I suspect it probably has to do with the requirements for CME approval. I think HIMSS was only approved for 22 CME hours this year, despite there being well over 100 sessions approved for credit. Many physicians struggle with the cost of CME, which makes me wonder why they don’t approve the conference for more than 22 hours, especially with the availability of on-demand courses. The content is broad and personally I prefer watching the sessions at home because I’m more focused than when I am in a group setting, especially if other attendees are distracting.

Although volumes were small today, they reminded me why I enjoy practicing medicine. When I first went into informatics full-time, I had about a year and a half gap where I didn’t see patients. Not from lack of interest, but from a lack of options for part-time family medicine docs with inflexible schedules. That’s when I started practicing urgent care and emergency medicine.

What we do certainly fits into the “life is like a box of chocolates” category. Where else can you see a patient roster that includes chief complaints of “fall on ice” and “poison ivy” in the same day after temperatures dropped from 70 to 20? Where else do you get first-hand knowledge of the aftermath of mechanical bull riding? (For those playing along with the home game, today’s answer was a fractured sesamoid bone in the thumb rather than the head injury you might expect.)

I also enjoy practicing medicine because I’ve finally found a spot in an organization where people are truly held accountable. Even in our state of rapid growth and geographic expansion, our leadership hasn’t wavered from their mission and vision. They’ve taken steps to reward employees who support those ideals. As a privately-owned practice, they are relentless in their ability to weed out slackers or those who aren’t committed to the mission. We run in a near-military culture and it’s not for everyone, but knowing your staff has your back (and most of the time is out in front of you getting it done before you even get there) makes being at work almost joyful.

We recently implemented a new bonus system. Instead of getting quarterly or semi-annual bonuses, staff members receive bonuses on an ongoing basis. Each month, every employee is given an allotment of “bonus bucks” to award to colleagues who are living the values. Although providers are on a different bonus structure (based on timeliness of care, quality, patient satisfaction, etc.) we have an allotment of bucks to give to staff. Each bonus award has to include specific commentary via hashtag of why the employee earned the bonus. Since providers have a large bank of bucks to give each month, people are eager to work quickly and efficiently and to operate truly as a team. We were doing well with the old system, but the new immediate recognition scheme has really pushed some people’s efforts over the top.

All employees can view a real-time suite of analytics showing top receivers, top givers, percent participation, and more. Bonus flow can be visualized as an activity network or via a word cloud that summarizes all the words used in the hashtag award notices. It’s pretty cool to watch how things flow over the course of time and across various teams – clinical, reception, radiology, and providers. Employees can cash in their bucks for gift cards, workplace swag, and even months without late shifts or in exchange for holiday shifts. Maybe it’s a bit gamified, but it’s working.

I’m glad to be back in the saddle and hope I’m fully cleared tomorrow, so I can get back in the air for my clients. My next two trips are to some of my favorite parts of the country and I’m looking forward to not being grounded any more.

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