Work Life Intervention

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The results are in and here they are:

A study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found no significant improvement in quality of care or error reduction between physicians at primary care clinics that used an intervention based on Healthy Work Place measures and those who did not.

 

So what happened?

  • “The researchers assessed data from the Healthy Work Place Study to evaluate work-life interventions and their effect on care quality and medical errors. This data included 34 clinics, 160 primary health care providers and 735 patients with diabetes or hypertension
  • The clinics were randomized to intervention or control arms. Clinics in the intervention arm received interventions designed based on data from Office and Work Life measures, and were aimed at “improving communication between providers, workflow redesign, and targeted chronic disease management programs.”

So, here is the conclusion:

“In summary, [the Healthy Work Place Study] has shown that work-life changes can lead to meaningful changes in clinician outcomes, but that these changes do not necessarily translate into improved patient care”.

I am not sure I know the answer here but what I think it is says is that you can try all the bogus fads to make doctors happy but it doesn’t help patient outcomes. The reason?  They are still in the crappy system that burns them out in the first place.  Let’s do a study with DPC docs who have only 600 patients each and we will see they are happier and their patients outcome improve?