CareMore Health System CEO Sachin Jain, M.D., says that the relationship between physicians and healthcare administrators “has never been more broken than it is today.”
He says that all too often physicians and administrators in the same organization don’t know and don’t trust each other, with endless additions of red tape and more rigorous reimbursement systems making things worse.
A Modern Healthcare article says that the Harvard Medical School-trained physician has empathy for the plight of fellow physicians.“They have never felt more burdened and more burned out,” he told about 200 people at the Healthcare Financial Management Association National Institute annual conference June 28.
Modern Healthcare reported that CareMore, “which provides about $1.2 billion of care annually, has established an academy to inform physicians about the cost pressures that administrators face, while putting administrators on the front lines with doctors so they can better understand the clinical decisions that physicians have to make in a period of shrinking reimbursement.”
Dr. Jain also said that how care is organized at hospitals and physicians’ offices should include input from front-line physicians, not just (in Modern Healthcare’s paraphrase) “physician managers who, within months of joining the administration, lose touch with the on-the-ground obstacles.”
The publication added, paraphrasing Dr. Jain: “Second, administrators should spend at least 10 percent of their time shadowing physicians and remain in contact with them to learn their struggles. The same is true of physicians, who need to spend 10 percent of their time learning about the latest healthcare business and reimbursement trends”.
Dr, Jain also said that administrators should drop “provider” from their vocabulary. Physicians, and other clinicians for that matter, didn’t go through the arduous training to become “providers.” They are about caring for people.
To read the article, please hit this link.
