The following is 100% true. Details have been changed to protect the guilty.
Act 1
Setting: A national corporate meeting of the regional operations directors who work within a healthcare delivery organization. The auditorium is full of several hundred attentive professionals attired in business casual. The reek of industrial-strength coffee fills the room as the morning presentation begins.
A tall, good-looking man strides across the stage to the podium. Very well dressed and wearing a nice white coat, he clears his throat and begins—
“There’s only one metric that drives our success, our future patient engagement, our reputation, and our repeat business.”
That metric is the degree of clinician engagement.”
“If the clinicians engage with the patient, if they are seen as looking out for our patient’s needs, if they personally see the patient and work with them side-by-side, then we succeed as an organization. If they don’t, then nothing else we can do will make any significant difference.”
“We must find ways to get our clinicians to engage with the patients.”
The well-caffeinated crowd of administrators nod in agreement and a buzz of affirmation fills the air.
Act 2
Setting: Immediately after the Medical Director’s presentation. A lone regional director approaches the stage exit as the now finished speaker descends. Another man, taller and better dressed than either, accompanies him. From his spare appearance, hunched shoulders and shiny elbows on his suit sleeves, the second man is clearly the VP of finance.
Lone regional director to both: “We have a physician who is engaging with our patients and driving our local reputation sky-high. But we’re not paying her for her patient encounters even though her contract calls for it. Can you help get that money released so she can continue doing exactly what you said needs to be done.”
Medical Director: “Of course, that is exactly the kind of —“
Finance VP (talking over the medical director): “We’re not getting reimbursed for those services and there’s enough wiggle room in her contract language that we shouldn’t need to pay. Besides, she’s an outlier. She’s seeing her patients far more than any other doctor in the organization. With that kind of work ethic, even if she doesn’t get as much money as she expects, she’ll still see her patients, though probably less often. She’ll give us plenty of value and we won’t have the extra expense.”
Act 3
Setting: The Future
Through disengagement or outright separation, the company loses it’s best, most motivated employees—the employees who drive the metric that’s most important to their corporate success.
Underperformance follows.
And no one can figure out why.
Your leaders probably don’t understand what it is that you really do.
You deliver your emotional product, healthcare. And you do it through their industrial system.
This mismatch is so far outside their worldview and training, they can’t even fathom the disconnect—or the challenges it generates.
When their systems fail to perform, their default setting is to further exploit your gifts for their own purposes—to have you perform uncompensated labor in an effort to support their corporate goals and limit their costs.
The flat refusal to pay in the narrative above is an extreme, though sadly real, example of the attitudes of those who decide on your compensation and workload.
But there are more insidious instances of the same process that may be happening to you right now.
Additional data entry, shifting payment schemes, online yet uncompensated patient management—all demanded of you without an extra penny in compensation for your efforts.
But almost always accompanies by the sticks of decreased professional “quality” ratings, financial penalties and the dreaded performance improvement plan for those who resist.
If you’re feeling disengaged, discouraged or burnt out, look around.
It may be that you’re simply being abused.
Corporate takers vacuuming the gifts of their clinician givers.
It’s your life. It’s your time.
What are you going to do about it?
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