The Joy of Medicine - AMA wants to Restore the Joy of Medicine

The AMA is investing in making happier doctors and believes it will help them delver better care. Physicians have been put under tremendous stress with government oversights and insurance companies, medical decisions are bound to be compromised. Frustration becomes even more apparent with trying to get approval for treatment and then dealing with denials and appeals for treating a patient.

Documentation alone takes away time that could be spent with the patient , however, focus must be spend on rules and regulations, to even keep your contracts which allows you to see patients and be reimbursed.

It seems the passion and the joy of practicing medicine has been taken over by administrative duties while time to engage with patients is being de-valued. We need to be sure our physicians have the time and resources to practice medicine. Patient satisfaction seems to be a very important aspect of care as well it should be, however, not at the cost of physicians being constantly evaluated pressured into decisions and scrutinized in everything they do. Patient outcomes are not always guaranteed to be 100% successful  

 "A healthier, happier nation is going to require a healthier, happier physician workforce," said Steven J. Stack, MD, the AMA's incoming president.

 "We want to restore the joy of medicine," said Stack, at an event announcing a new web site. AMA STEPS Forward, is a series of web-based interactive modules intended to allow doctors to "work smarter, not harder," and thus relieve physician burnout. "Physicians feel besieged by the overwhelming regulatory burden, by paper work, by the lack of time to interact with patients." STEPS Forward is conceived as a group of "discrete, concrete, focused tools" that physicians can dip into "in a just-add-water kind of way" to make their practices more efficient, and thus give them more personal satisfaction, he said.

 "We were getting a meta-signal that there were problems in running physician practices," said AMA Executive Vice President and CEO James L. Madara, MD. Through interviews and focus groups the AMA identified "dissatisfiers and satisfiers" in the practice of medicine. There was only one real satisfier, Madara said: "Having enough time one-on-one with patients, and feeling at the end of the day that you had done a good job." Dissatisfiers included the increased busy-ness of the practice, electronic medical records, and administrative overload.

STEPS Forward™ offers innovative strategies that will allow physicians and their staff to thrive in the new health care environment.

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