Can The Digital Crowd Cure Physician Burn-out?
"A hollow, sinking feeling of dissatisfaction and contempt for the art and science of medicine" — this is the way I like to describe physician burn-out. Burn-out isn't a specific "disease". It is rather a symptom of an even bigger, overarching problem.
Across the globe, the health sector appears to be facing this challenge. A silent challenge which is not at the forefront of discussions. It is reported by the American Medical Association that 43.2% of doctors are currently experiencing burn-out.
As earlier stated, burn-out is a symptom of an overarching problem, or a myriad of problems. The problem is the structure and infrastructure, or the lack of it thereof. The current healthcare system in many parts of the globe continues to force physicians to be less focused on seeing their patients. Doctors now have to contend with administrative tasks, as well as bureaucratic kinks just to even obtain the necessary equipment and facilities required to save lives.
But what if a better, more efficient method existed to better sort out these administrative issues and bureaucratic bottlenecks. What would it look like? Would it reduce the rate and intensity of physician burn-out?
What if the administration wasn't a comglomerate of power and profit hungry boards and individuals? What if it were a transparent, physician-governed smart contract built on blockchain technology?
Enter Health DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations).
A DAO is a blockchain-based organizational structure that operates without a central governing body. Its rules and decision-making processes are encoded into smart contracts, which are self-executing programs that run on a distributed ledger.
Think of it as an organization that isn't governed by a board of directors, but by a group of individuals with equal rights in terms of decision making and operations.
I strongly believe that DAOs could favor the physician in terms of relieving unnecessary workload, hence eliminating burn-out and maximizing patient outcomes. Here's how I believe it could work:
1. Restoring the agency of physicians: The primary causal factor of burn-out in the medical space is decline in doctor autonomy. A DAO allows doctors to hold governance tokens and to be directly involved in the daily operations of the organization. This gives them the literal right to vote on crucial decisions like patient to doctor ratio, procurement of medical devices and technology as well as clinical procedures. This significantly shifts the physician from just being an employee to being a key stakeholder.
2. Decreasing administrative tasks: Doctor's spend nearly two hours of paperwork for one hour of patient care. Doctors literally spend more time on papers than on patients. This means less time spent doing the job they actually want to do; saving lives. DAOs can help solve this, leveraging on blockchain technology for automated administrative functions, thus stripping away those tasks from Doctors so they can focus more on their patients.
3. Provision of better value: The traditional medical system measures value by number of patients seen, rather than the quality of each consultation. This puts Doctors in a constant battle of having to balance the quality of each consultation with time. It's not practical to spend 1 hour with a patient when there is a long queue outside waiting their turn. DAOs can help balance this by allowing doctors take decisions concerning clinical work load and doctor to patient ratio.
The Takeaway
Physician burn-out and dissatisfaction is on the rise, but De-Sci can offer us the tools needed to move away from draining healthcare systems to more collaborative ecosystems that prioritize balance, quality of care and ultimately longevity.
#DeSci #DAO #healthcare #Web3 #blockchain
