Surveys show that physician burnout is a growing problem, with nearly half of those working in outpatient settings reporting they're feeling burned out. David Rothbart, MD, president of Spine Team Texas in Southlake, told "Becker's ASC Review Podcast" CMS is partially to blame.
Note: This is an edited excerpt. Listen to the full podcast episode here.
Question: What makes you nervous?
Dr. David Rothbart: What makes me nervous? … Physician burnout. It's the real deal; we're seeing it more and more, and I think that the challenges with COVID have only thrown gasoline onto the fire.
[There's also] this flip-flop between inpatient-only and outpatient. We live in a world [of] increased encroachment by government and by insurance companies in the practice of medicine. In my generation and before my generation, we're generally fiercely independent individuals, and we went through a lot of training to get where we are. And to have either the government or the insurance company tell us how to practice is a huge issue.
I think it also plays into that physician burnout piece of the equation. Last week I had a patient who came to me after being treated elsewhere with a failed fusion. She happens to be a veteran of the armed forces. I did a peer-to-peer to discuss what my treatment plan was for the patient. It's very clearly documented. And yet that patient was turned down to have surgery. And this poor patient has no alternatives here. So it's things like that that really can disrupt the enjoyment and the pleasure of what we do, but at the end of the day, I still love it. And I hope my colleagues do as well.