In the excitement of having mobile access to all our patients’ data, are we doctors giving up the last shreds of that non-renewable resource – our free time ? Dr. Wes asks this important question in his recent blog post titled “When the Doctor’s Always In“. Dr. Westby Fisher is a cardiac electrophysiologist in Chicago and if you do not already follow his excellent medical blog, I highly recommend you check it out.
In this post, he makes a very real observation:
we’re seeing a powerful force emerge – a subtle marketing of limitless physician availability facilitated by the advance of the electronic medical record, social media, and smart phones. Doctors, you see, must be always present, always available, always giving.
The dark side of having access mobile access to patient information is that you never leave the office. While all physicians have to struggle with balancing the demands of their profession with their family life, for most docs being at home and not on call meant being away from work. But, as patient care continues to generate more information per patient, the trend is to incrementally blur this separation.
To preserve their personal life and get home at a reasonable hour each day, test reviews and patient communications are increasingly performed from home – all for free.
Doctors already have to contend with patient emails (and sometimes Tweets and Facebook invites), but, Dr. Wes asks
Should our medical students expect that their lives will be surrendered to their patients, free of charge, as they answer the never-ending bounty of health care questions online?
Better integrated electronic health records and increasingly powerful and always-connected smartphones clearly will help us take better care of our patients. The question is who is going to take care of the doctors ?
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And of course, the obvious irony is that doctors are already undervalued and viewed as overpaid by the general public at their current 60-90 hour workweeks. Yet, because of the sense of responsibility of the type of person that enters the field, there isn’t much doctors can do about it…you’re not going to see a “doctor strike” anytime soon.
Meanwhile, House M.D. gets a half million per episode.
Couldn’t agree more
There is talk about paying doctors for offline communications as part of the “medical home”
We’ll see, I guess. If anything, the acceleration of technological adoption means that payment models are falling further and further behind the reality of what we do on a daily basis. Maybe somebody will come up with an email micropayment app !
Even with small advances such as compensation for mobile medicine, one has to imagine that eventually there will be some sort of tipping point. Maybe that will be the continuing decline of people entering the profession, or the reorganization of physicians into a more inclusive and effective organization than the AMA. Either way, doctors just don’t seem to have a definitive hand in the policy making (I wonder how many hospital presidents or chiefs of medicine were consulted to draft the big healthcare bill?).