Hey y'all,
I just wanted to introduce myself, and as what appears to be tradition, share a little of my story. I feel like I owe it to y'all after reading many of yours (many of which are super inspiring)! If you don't want to read my own rambling thoughts (and I don't blame you) skip to the TL; DR.
I'm a practicing physician in my 30s. Single, no kids, some financial obligations, but nothing too strenuous. I came upon the book and this forum after searching for a bit as to what I wanted to actually do with my life. What I think alot of docs (and I guess people in general) get surprised by is that you spend your entire life since high school on a track that requires almost all of your time and focus that when you finish, you kind of look around after you try to convince someone who just had a heart attack that it's time to quit smoking (and you fail) or it's your 200th appendectomy and you think, "Huh...so this is it?" Such was my life. I went through high school then college got accepted to (in my opinion) a really great med school and stayed there for training. I took a little time off for personal reasons and then got reved up by my mentors to continue with more training. Then I stopped to think, do I really want to keep doing this?
The answer is, honestly, no. Alot of me really enjoys being a doc. I get satisfaction from my job, my work-free time equation is 1:1, and I would say I am fairly compensated. What bothers me, though, is that medicine is almost hateful toward innovation. It bothers me that there's so much built up in our healthcare-industrial-bureacratic complex (of which, I admit, I am a part) that it's hard to get to real medicine. For every minute of bedside patient time, for every minute I spend reading about my patients learning them and their disease, I or my nurses spend at least 1 to 2 trying to track down records, figuring out what medicines they take, or the names of their doctors. That doesn't even start about insurance companies, governmental reimbursements and "quality measures." I love making people better, but I hate the bureaucracy of it. That's when I decided that I would do more training, but in skills other than medicine.
Now, I'm not saying I have any answers, I probably don't, but we don't start at forcing solutions onto problems, we start by finding problems, no? Fix any one of those and you have a seven figure company. Trust me, the system is broken enough that there are opportunities for multiple solutions to each one and a myriad of others I won't even bore you with. If anyone (or everyone) with any programming savvy wants to chat, I would love to lay out a few ideas. If anyone wants feedback on ideas in healthcare, I would love to discuss. I've seen a few docs on the forum, and I would love to get their take in their practices. Any direction you guys can give me in how best I can use my skills outside of clinical practice would be helpful. I hope to become an active member of the community, and I hope the community can help figure out some of these problems, because, honestly, the solution benefits all of us.
TL;DR: I became a doctor, got a little disillusioned, now I want to use my skills to fix at least some small part of our medical system (and perhaps pave a little Fastlane for myself and others?)
Anyway, that's my story. I don't want to sound like a spoiled brat, because objectively I can't complain. I've just found that sitting back with my feet up thinking about how awesome life is and letting it pass you buy is not the definition of the fast lane. We only got one life, right? We should dominate it.
Looking forward to being a part of this community,
MH
I just wanted to introduce myself, and as what appears to be tradition, share a little of my story. I feel like I owe it to y'all after reading many of yours (many of which are super inspiring)! If you don't want to read my own rambling thoughts (and I don't blame you) skip to the TL; DR.
I'm a practicing physician in my 30s. Single, no kids, some financial obligations, but nothing too strenuous. I came upon the book and this forum after searching for a bit as to what I wanted to actually do with my life. What I think alot of docs (and I guess people in general) get surprised by is that you spend your entire life since high school on a track that requires almost all of your time and focus that when you finish, you kind of look around after you try to convince someone who just had a heart attack that it's time to quit smoking (and you fail) or it's your 200th appendectomy and you think, "Huh...so this is it?" Such was my life. I went through high school then college got accepted to (in my opinion) a really great med school and stayed there for training. I took a little time off for personal reasons and then got reved up by my mentors to continue with more training. Then I stopped to think, do I really want to keep doing this?
The answer is, honestly, no. Alot of me really enjoys being a doc. I get satisfaction from my job, my work-free time equation is 1:1, and I would say I am fairly compensated. What bothers me, though, is that medicine is almost hateful toward innovation. It bothers me that there's so much built up in our healthcare-industrial-bureacratic complex (of which, I admit, I am a part) that it's hard to get to real medicine. For every minute of bedside patient time, for every minute I spend reading about my patients learning them and their disease, I or my nurses spend at least 1 to 2 trying to track down records, figuring out what medicines they take, or the names of their doctors. That doesn't even start about insurance companies, governmental reimbursements and "quality measures." I love making people better, but I hate the bureaucracy of it. That's when I decided that I would do more training, but in skills other than medicine.
Now, I'm not saying I have any answers, I probably don't, but we don't start at forcing solutions onto problems, we start by finding problems, no? Fix any one of those and you have a seven figure company. Trust me, the system is broken enough that there are opportunities for multiple solutions to each one and a myriad of others I won't even bore you with. If anyone (or everyone) with any programming savvy wants to chat, I would love to lay out a few ideas. If anyone wants feedback on ideas in healthcare, I would love to discuss. I've seen a few docs on the forum, and I would love to get their take in their practices. Any direction you guys can give me in how best I can use my skills outside of clinical practice would be helpful. I hope to become an active member of the community, and I hope the community can help figure out some of these problems, because, honestly, the solution benefits all of us.
TL;DR: I became a doctor, got a little disillusioned, now I want to use my skills to fix at least some small part of our medical system (and perhaps pave a little Fastlane for myself and others?)
Anyway, that's my story. I don't want to sound like a spoiled brat, because objectively I can't complain. I've just found that sitting back with my feet up thinking about how awesome life is and letting it pass you buy is not the definition of the fast lane. We only got one life, right? We should dominate it.
Looking forward to being a part of this community,
MH
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