Ever wondered why so many physicians are leaving their profession? What if we told you that 63% of them are experiencing symptoms of burnout and over 117,000 have quit in the past year alone? Join us, your hosts Aaron Higgins and Jason Crosby, as we unpack the harsh realities of physician burnout and the alarming rise in cyber attacks in the healthcare industry. Our conversation takes us on a journey through recent news headlines as we shed light on these issues with a surge of anxiety-inducing statistics. We also explore how technological advancements such as AI could potentially lighten the administrative load on healthcare providers, thereby reducing stress levels and keeping more doctors in the profession.
But the problems don’t stop there. Did you know that an astonishing 88% of healthcare organizations report an average of 40 cyber attacks in the past year? We delve into the costly repercussions of these attacks, highlighting their disruptive impact on operations and potential consequences on patient care. As we sound the alarm on the need for enhanced cybersecurity measures, we also share actionable tips on how organizations can protect themselves. The future of healthcare is a complex web of challenges and opportunities, and we’re here to guide you through it. So, buckle up and stay tuned for our next episode where we’ll dive into the 2024 final rule and its implications on MIPS and QPP. This is a conversation you won’t want to miss!
Guest: Jason Crosby, VP Network Integration & Strategic Planning, SHP
Jason currently serves as the Vice President of Strategic Planning & Network Integration for Strategic Healthcare Partners (SHP) of Savannah, GA, with whom he has been employed for 13 years. With SHP, he oversees the Clinically Integrated Network activity, as well as the Business Development and Strategic Planning function.
Prior to joining SHP, Jason served as Finance Director for Georgia Emergency Associates, Decision Support Manager at Memorial Health, and as a Finance Lead with Gulfstream Aerospace.
Guest: Aaron Higgins, Data Manager & IT Strategist, SHP
Aaron Higgins has worked with SHP since 2019 as the Data Manager and all around Quality Payment Program expert. In 2021, his role expanded to include IT Strategy to help SHP navigate the changing IT landscape in a post-COVID workplace. Prior to working at SHP, Aaron worked in various private practices starting in 2008, where he typically held dual roles as both the Health IT Administrator and Meaningful Use/PQRS Manager, and in 2015 he moved to the Savannah area to oversee the Quality Payment Program for a private practice. Every year, since coming to SHP, Aaron has provided a webinar series updating QPP eligible practices on the proposed & final rule changes coming to QPP (recordings of which can be found on the SHP website).
When not reading the annual Final Rule or answering questions about QPP, Aaron can be found serving on the board of Family Promise of the Coastal Empire, church committees, and on the Pooler city council. Aaron lives in Pooler, GA with his wife and golden retriever.
Transcript
Aaron Higgins:
Welcome to Beyond the Stethoscope final conversations with SHP. Today, jason and I sit down and we go through some of the latest news headlines that we feel are really important considering the times that we’re in. Then we also talk about some of the upcoming and remaining episodes of season three. Are you ready for this final conversation? Let’s get started. Welcome to the podcast. This is Aaron Higgins and I’m here with my partner in chief, jason Crosby. Jason, how are you doing?
Jason Crosby:
today, aaron, hey, bud, I’m doing well. How are you?
Aaron Higgins:
I’m doing pretty good. We’re recording this right before Thanksgiving, so I am looking forward to three days of eating a ton of food and a ton of leftovers and then a fourth day of being burned out on set food and leftovers and just wanting a pizza.
Jason Crosby:
That and a big imprint of my body on the couch because I laid there so long.
Aaron Higgins:
Where you almost get to the point of using to it, but not quite.
Jason Crosby:
Yeah, and then the official switch over to Christmas season. Right, that’s what we do. It’s the Friday after, so on Friday tree goes up. We’re ready to go, we have made the switch.
Aaron Higgins:
Yeah, I’ll be doing what professionals should be doing, and that is hanging up my own Christmas lights on a two story house. So prayers would be appreciated.
Jason Crosby:
Yeah, yeah, it’s pretty risky.
Aaron Higgins:
Well, Jason, we have some news to talk through today kind of a wide variety, so why don’t you kick us off?
Jason Crosby:
Yeah, tell you what a couple of things I’ve caught my eyes. Nothing new, but just kind of more updated information, right? So real quick physician bar now. Yet what I like about this article, particular surveys that crisis of physician burnout in the promise of technology. So a little interesting twist. You know, some of the news still still one in the same when it comes to physician burnout. Most recent survey by the American Medical Association, sometimes we’re reported by 63% of physicians. This is as of the end of 2021. So when I give a time frame there, 63% compared to 42%, just from three years earlier felt they began to show more symptoms of burnout, basically from both patient and provider satisfaction, just during that three year uptick, obviously exacerbated by the pandemic, but some of those symptoms being rising rates and depression, anxiety and even some suicidal thoughts on behalf of the provider. So not only a much larger increase in the percentage that at least expressed that burnout, but the intensity of those symptoms also are rising, and so while we hear those surveys quite a bit, we can’t tune it out to being white noise. We got to pay attention to it, right? We’ve talked about that in previous seasons, you and I, and so that’s one reason this article caught my attention and another reason to it data sample. I know you’re a data guy. Well, this one shows that over 117,000 physicians think about that. 117,000 physicians left the profession between first quarter of 2020 and the fourth quarter of 2021. That’s pretty stinking alarming, right and further. I went on to explain to various states we won’t get into the details, but California, for example. You and I talk a lot about primary care. Well, the shortage there now is an additional 4,700 primary care physicians to simply get back to where they believe they should be on the primary care side. And so naturally, this talks about the burden that administrative work adds, and that’s kind of where the article went into. Hopefully, technology can help, because they’re estimating over 22 hours per week is what ER navigation adds to your average provider, 22 hours a week. And so there’s sort of how do we improve with AI usage, maybe to help out with some of that to alleviate symptoms reporting? The survey, so one of those where the physician burnout data is, you know, tugs at you. It really does kind of hit home with a lot of the symptoms being reported, but on the flip side, hey, let’s utilize some of the technology to be a little bit more efficient to help out with those symptoms.
Aaron Higgins:
Right, and I have to wonder too. So again, we’re recording right before Thanksgiving. So today was announced that Microsoft has snatched up the chat GPT folk who were ousted by their board just over the weekend here. So there’s been a lot of changes in the AI world. So it’s gonna be interesting to see how that changes, because Microsoft has already invested billions. They’re planning on investing billions more, so it’ll be interesting to see some of these AI folks that are experts in the field being brought into Microsoft’s wheelhouse. And why I think that’s interesting is because of the millions that Microsoft has said that they’re gonna pour into healthcare over the next coming years. So there may be good news on the horizon with using AI to get rid of some of this busy work these physicians feel like they’re having a deal with.
Jason Crosby:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, at least it’s going in the right direction, like you’re saying.
Aaron Higgins:
Yeah, absolutely Well, kind of tangential to that and maybe contributing to some of the frustrations and burnout on other providers. It’s a slightly older article but it’s summing up the last year’s worth of cyber attacks. So we’ve talked about this in past seasons. It’s worth talking about some more. So they surveyed Proofpoint and I’m gonna get this wrong Ponynam Institute, an IT research group. They surveyed over 650 IT and cybersecurity professionals and they said that 88% of surveyed organizations experienced an average of 40 cyber attacks in the last 12 months. So that’s everything from a successful hack to a near successful hack something that registered on the scale. I know personally. I see thousands of attempted break-ins into my websites and networks. I don’t count those as cyber attacks, but so these are actually coordinated cyber attacks where someone made an effort. The average cost of it a successful cyber attack was $5 million. So that’s crypto virus or so many broken and stole stuff. The most expensive cost was for disruptions to normal healthcare operations. So that’s going to be you can’t take care of your patients. They’re saying that that costs about 1.3 million and this is granted aimed at hospitals and healthcare systems, but I’m sure practices have scaled level costs associated with this In. The larger the practice, the higher the cost is going to be. 57% reported poor patient outcomes due to delays in procedures and tests, 50% reported an increase in complications from surgery and 23% of organizations reported increased patient mortality rates during cyber attacks 23% so 23% of patients died during cyber attacks. That is staggering, that’s a stat you just don’t hear about. We can’t think of this as just attacks of zeros and ones and, oh gee, the phones and computers are down. People’s lives are literally being affected by this. There’s some other stats that are primarily around cost and everything, ransom payments and that sort of thing. We’ll put a link to this report in the show notes. It’s worth looking at and remember. It’s not just the dollar cost, it’s the human live cost that is coming out of these attacks, particularly as they get more frequent and as they get more vicious, bringing down the systems that we’re relying upon. Like it’s going back to your point earlier, jason, this could be contributing towards physician burnout, particularly if you’re losing patients because your EMR was down.
Jason Crosby:
Yeah, and just another heavy burden on providers. A lot of our administrators are listening. Just another thing that they’ve got to employ, watch over, look at it every day, and expenses that add up, I’m sure.
Aaron Higgins:
Right and so far, listeners who are going OK. Well, what can I do about this? I’m not an IT or I’m just an administrator. I’m just a doctor. Talk to your IT department. Find out what are their needs. Odds are they have a wish list of things they would like to do, but they lack the funding or they lack the ability to implement them. Think about increasing your IT budget. It’s not a cost center anymore. Get that thought out of your mind. I think that IT is critical to ensuring that your patients are staying alive, and another thing, too, that everybody can do, no matter who you are within an organization, is don’t use an easy password. I think most systems are shifting away from allowing you to use easy passwords but using 123456 or password or 11111. That’s not good enough anymore. It never has been good enough, but it certainly isn’t good enough. I’ll put a link in the show notes to the list of the 30 most common passwords in this last year. And how do we know these are the most common passwords? Because bad guys are capturing databases and they’re dumping passwords out. This is the list of the most common. If you use one of these, stop using it. Don’t use the same password everywhere and go change your passwords. So we’ll have a link to that in the show notes. So, jason, what else you got for us? Hopefully something a little more upbeat than my Debbie Downer news.
Jason Crosby:
Well, just real quick. Just another survey that was done. Yes, I’m in the survey kind of mood, this one by class KLAS, if you’re not familiar with them, class research, who collaborated with the College of Health Care Info Management, which I know a lot of you guys are familiar with as well, on just digital technology amongst healthcare providers. So the survey showed that over 80 percent of healthcare organization survey employ some form of advanced analytics. But and this is definitely not new We’ve both experienced this being on the provider side before Most have varying solutions from multiple vendors and thusly not integrated. So that perlate into a discussion and survey about AI and the use of AI being a tool or another mechanism to help with the lack of integration that exists. So with that load bit deeper, dive in the survey Again, the surveys as of November 15th, so pretty recently released, where about 40 percent of the US hospitals replied on how they anticipate using AI. As you can imagine and that’s a good thing that clinical workflows is at the top of each of those segments, whether it’s using AI, machine learning, even predictive analytics was tops of the list. Now, pop health you would have thought pop health or RevCycle even would be up there. No, 46 percent of the respondents were reported that predictive analytics usage will be based off of improving clinical workflows and the use of AI for that. Next to that would be pop health and RevCycle management. So again, just another interesting look at how can we use AI to maybe help out with existing tools. So some of these folks are starting to look at using it as an integration mechanism between tools that are already in place. So found that interesting because I haven’t read much about that being a common use of AI and healthcare, but it makes sense to me, yeah no doubt.
Aaron Higgins:
Well, I think we’re coming right up on time. Anything else that we need to cover today, Jason?
Jason Crosby:
Well, tell you what we’ve got. Like you said, by the time this airs, we have a couple more weeks of the podcast where we have two interviews. Join us the following week, or next week rather, with what’s definitely the most exciting podcast we’ve had to date, because it includes my partner and crime, aaron Higgins. Yeah, crowd goes crazy. Crowd goes wild. Everybody hangs up. No, just kidding. So Aaron’s going to go over. If you guys haven’t heard it before. He did this last year review of the 2024 final rule and specifically, mips or QPP Lots of changes, as always, lots of impact. So be sure to listen out for that. Aaron, I know, does a great job and he’ll have a tremendous interviewer as well. So please pay attention to that. Anything you want to add there, aaron? A teaser.
Aaron Higgins:
Definitely a little bit of a teaser. The last couple of years, due to a little minor pandemic that swept through the nation, cms kind of pumps the brakes a little bit on QPP. They didn’t release a whole lot of changes. They’re kind of making up for lost time. So there’s a lot to go over. It’s going to be a long episode. We might have to split it into two, but there’s a lot to cover. So if you’re involved in QPP in any way, so if you’re a private practice, if you’re an owned practice or maybe you’re part of an ACO, there’s going to be something that we’re going to cover, because there’s a lot in this final rule and a little bit more than we thought there was even going to be from the proposed rule. So CMS has been very busy these last few months cooking up what’s changing with QPP. So be sure to tune into that, not just so you can hear me talk about it, for what we’ll see, mike, in eternity, I’m sure, but this is important information for your practice because there’s no avoiding it, not really not anymore.
Jason Crosby:
That’s right. And then the following week, to actually end our season of interviews, will be Matt Usher. Matt is a benefit consultant with Ray Williams and associates. He’s actually strategic healthcare partners broker as well, and Matt does an excellent job of just overall education on the benefit side, from both the employer side but also the consumer, and so we’re going to talk about trends, challenges and just general insight he’s got from both the employer and consumer inside as we head into 2024. And we’ll go over all the data you’re hearing about premium hikes, coverage options etc. For both small and midsize organizations. We’ll talk about TPA solutions, direct contracting, hrca, as you name it. We’re going to go over it and probably what’s going to be a two parter with Matt, and again that’ll be the week of December 11th as we wrap up season three. So looking forward to both those interviews.
Aaron Higgins:
Wow, it’s hard to believe we’ve already gotten to the end of season three. It seems like just the other day we were recording the first episode of this season and here we are just beginning to wrap up. So thanks to our audience for hanging out with us these last several weeks, as we’ve done season three, but again, we got plenty more in store, plenty for you to listen to. We look forward to bringing it to your ears.
Jason Crosby:
Exactly. We’re going to rate what you said. Thank you, everybody, and we look forward to the interviews here in the coming weeks.
Aaron Higgins:
Alrighty, Jason. Well, I think that is all. You have a wonderful day.
Jason Crosby:
You too, aaron. Thanks, buddy. Bye-bye. You’ve been listening to Beyond the Stealth Scoop Bottle Conversations with SHB. This has been a production of strategic health care partners.
Aaron Higgins:
Your hosts are Jason Crosby and me, aaron C Higgins. This episode is produced and edited by Nile and Weave.
Jason Crosby:
Our social media content producer is Jeremy Miller, the transcribers Heather McLean, and our executive producers are Mike Schrimler and John Currie.
Aaron Higgins:
For more information about SHP, the services we offer, including the back library of episodes, episode transcripts, links to resources that we discussed, and much more, please visit our website at shbllccom. Thank you for listening.