About a quarter of physicians have invested the time and money to join an accountable care organization, but few of them report benefiting personally from it, according to a new survey on physician outlook.
That might be one contributor to the frustration found among 3,500 physicians surveyed recently by staffing agency Jackson Healthcare (which, as a side note, did not look at improvements in cost or quality of care resulting from ACOs as part of the survey). Forty-two percent of physicians said they were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with their medical practice.
A few other notable trends were reflected in the findings:
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They continue to leave private practice. Fifteen percent of physicians were part of solo practices, down from 21 percent last year. Conversely, the number of hospital-employed physicians increased from 20 percent to 26 percent. Here’s a real sign of the times: two in five physicians younger than 45 had never worked in a private practice.
They’re stressed about changes stemming from healthcare reform. The top reasons for leaving private practice? High overhead costs, administrative hassles and reimbursement cuts.
They’re not optimistic about the future. Six in 10 wouldn’t recommend the medical profession to the next generation. This was especially common in young physicians in primary care, family medicine, emergency medicine and critical care who worked more than 12 hours per day, the report noted.
Jackson Healthcare proposes that all of these factors are contributing to an impending physician shortage. The Wall Street Journal’s experts proposed some solutions to this in a recent article, which is worth a read: let nurses provide primary care, relieve doctors of student loan debts and expand the scope of practice to allow other caregivers to provide more services.
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At the Abarca Forward conference earlier this year, George Van Antwerp, managing director at Deloitte, discussed how social determinants of health and a personalized member experience can improve medication adherence and health outcomes.
[Photo credit: Flickr user Tricia Wang]
