During my talk at the Illinois MGMA Fall Financial Conference a couple weeks ago, I asked a simple question:
“How much are your physicians required to work?”
I heard all kinds of answers: some clear, some complicated, some hesitant.
There’s no right or wrong answer to the question—it depends on a lot of factors, after all—but you do need to have an answer.
When workload expectations aren’t clear, physicians will fill the gaps themselves. They’ll succumb to the pressure and say yes to everything—another shift, another inbox message, another meeting, another patient—until they eventually can’t say yes to anything, because they’re burned out. After all, these are people who chose to spend precious years of their young adult lives in medical school and training, who chose to go hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt, all so that they could serve.
I’ve seen this pattern in practices across the country:
Enormous pressure + unclear boundaries = leaders left managing burnout instead of performance
So, I’ve got two questions for you:
- How much are full-time physicians in your practice required to work?
- How much do you think your physicians could work before it becomes unsustainable and they reach their breaking points?
If you don’t have answers to either/both of these questions, start with a hypothesis and test it out. Even a rough starting point helps you monitor what’s truly sustainable (for the physician and for the practice), and you can always make adjustments.
