Podcast Episode 16 | How Health Executives Can Address Medical Burnout

Dr. Kevin Mosser (00:00):

Doctors are not recommending their profession with the enthusiasm and the passion that they used to, and I think that should break everybody's heart.

Speaker 2 (00:10):

From Spaugh Dameron Tenny, it's White Coat Wellness, a show for doctors who are ready to improve their financial wellness. We know you work hard to help your patients, but you can't be at your best if you don't have your own finances in order. In White Coat Wellness, we highlight real life stories from physicians and dentists to educate, encourage and inspire you to personal, professional and financial wellness. Now, from Spaugh Dameron Tenny, please welcome your host, Shane Tenny.

Shane Tenny (00:39):

Welcome back. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with a seasoned health system executive who served as CEO of WellSpan Health in Pennsylvania, a hospital system with over a thousand physicians and nearly 19,000 employees. Dr Kevin Mosser is experienced in all facets of quality and operations performance including physicians practice management, quality improvement, culture development, fiscal discipline. He's retired from the role of CEO and is currently a senior medical consultant for SE Healthcare and the law firm, Saxton & Stump in Pennsylvania. And today, we're going to talk a little bit about the role that that health system executives play in addressing burnout as well as just other trends in medicine. Dr Mosser, thanks so much for making time for us today.

Dr. Kevin Mosser (01:27):

It's my pleasure to be here.

Shane Tenny (01:28):

Maybe we could just rewind a little bit, and I'll ask you to start at the beginning, how you found yourself in medicine and maybe a little bit about the early years in your path over to WellSpan.

Dr. Kevin Mosser (01:38):

Well, I found myself in medicine really as a passion, as most people do. My father was a dentist, and I was used to a healthcare system, but I really had my sights set on medicine. I finished college and medical school and did my residency training actually in York, Pennsylvania, which is where WellSpan is headquartered, and then was in private practice for about eight years and was recruited away from that practice in order to teach in the family practice residency at York Hospital. I'm a family physician by training. So from there, I just kind of wandered around through the healthcare system and one day became CEO. I'm not quite sure how that happened.

Shane Tenny (02:23):

Took a wrong turn down the hallway I think.

Dr. Kevin Mosser (02:24):

Something like that, somewhere, yes.

Shane Tenny (02:26):

Yeah. What was the ... you went from practice and a panel of patients into gradually transitioning over into the administrative side of medicine. When did that become a path that you began to be aware of and thought would be stimulating and interesting and one you wanted to pursue?

Dr. Kevin Mosser (02:44):

Well, WellSpan began to pursue the creation of an employed physician group in about 1994. And at that time, I was teaching family medicine, and I was pretty happy doing it, but I had gotten involved in a lot of different things, managed care. I had done some work managing our model practice in the family practice center and was asked to move over to our brand new medical group, which at that time had about 11 to 15 physicians, and be the medical director. So I went there to try to support the physicians as they made the transition from their private practices into an employed group and see if we could build this group in a somewhat unique way to support our doctors.

Shane Tenny (03:28):

And that leadership role eventually progressed up and up into asking you to take over the whole kit and caboodle?

Dr. Kevin Mosser (03:38):

Yeah. I had a lot of fun. I did the medical group. I became the CEO of the medical group, then I moved to Gettysburg Hospital. Most people know about Gettysburg from the Civil War and was the CEO of that hospital for about eight years. Then I moved back to corporate headquarters to become the chief operating officer and eventually CEO.

Shane Tenny (04:01):

Your career spans a couple decades. You've seen a lot of changes in medicine, I imagine.

Dr. Kevin Mosser (04:07):

Many, many changes.

Shane Tenny (04:09):

And what do you see ... prior to your retirement, I guess, or up now, where do you see the biggest changes that are most impacting physicians?

Dr. Kevin Mosser (04:20):

Oh, I think the biggest change has been the movement from independent practice, or what I like to term, self-employed practice, to a practice in some type of corporate employment, be it a hospital system or be it a for-profit company, be it mergers of different practices into a larger group, which then by its nature begins to function in a more corporate fashion. Maybe three or four orthopedic groups come together. They hire a CEO, and then there's a structure for the physicians to work under as well. So there are many, many iterations of physician employment, but that shift from people coming out of their residency desiring to do independent practice and practices being able to accommodate and recruit those young physicians, that shift to move doctors into employment, I think has been incredibly impactful on our lives as physicians.

Shane Tenny (05:19):

And impactful, let me ask you to define that impactful. Positive or impactful negative?

Dr. Kevin Mosser (05:25):

I think there have been many positives. I think, particularly, for a generation of physicians that prefers a more structured work style, not having to handle the business of medicine, the business of a practice, can be a big advantage. I spent many, many hours trying to get the books to close out at the end of the month. I spent a lot of hours buying the telephones for the practice, handling personnel issues, a variety of things that actually the modern employed physician typically does not have to deal with. On the other hand, the physician in a smaller, self-employed practice has an awful lot of autonomy and control over how that practice operates that they lose in an employed situation.

Shane Tenny (06:11):

Yeah. From our world as a firm that advocates for physicians from the financial planning perspective, it definitely seems that over the last two decades there's been that consolidation as medicine's gotten more complex and reimbursements have gotten tighter to come by and joining a group has been advantageous. I have been struck over the last few years with the growth of, albeit small still at this stage, but the growth of telemedicine, of direct primary care, of some of those things. And as an outsider, as a lay person, if you will, I wonder to myself, and maybe I throw this out there to you, is the pendulum swinging back a little bit from the years of consolidation into a healthcare system into more self-employed practices or alternative styles of medicine?

Dr. Kevin Mosser (07:05):

I really don't think so, not for the bulk of physicians. I think there's some movement to concierge medicine, which for many doctors has been a pretty healthy step, but obviously there's a limit to how many doctors can actually practice that way, and it's not for everybody. Even the telehealth, telemedicine, those are really all about the huge change in consumer expectation of healthcare. Where we've gone from my style of practice, which was back in the 80s, which was really to answer the telephone, try to help somebody. If I couldn't help them, we could just try to get them through until Monday and people were pretty patient about it.

Dr. Kevin Mosser (07:43):

We thought we were cutting edge in the 1980s because we had evening office hours, and so if you called, we could book you at 11 o'clock at night. No patient's going to tolerate that anymore. They'll just hang up the phone and go to urgent care, so the desire for this instantaneous access. Another big impact on healthcare in which people just simply aren't quite as specific for an acute problem as to who they're going to see as to how fast they can be seen. Chronic care, however, I do firmly believe will continue to remain a continuity practice going forward.

Shane Tenny (08:22):

And do you think ... I was speaking with an executive of the Novant Health System down in the Southeast, in North Carolina, where we are based. And the conversation was covering a variety of topics, some of which you're referencing here, and the access to healthcare through the Affordable Care Act and that sort of thing. And he really posited the point that as consumers want more choices and demand more choices and there's an evolution around that, that there very well may end up being almost a two-tier healthcare system in the country or access, as you point out, to concierge medicine. Well, folks that can afford that and can access that, then it's available for them, and those who can't then use traditional means. What are your thoughts around that?

Dr. Kevin Mosser (09:05):

I agree. I think there's a cost to access. I think what we see is we see that people who can pay often have better access to telemedicine. It is very often a cash business. Much urgent care is done on a for-profit basis and as a cash over-the-counter business. We'll continue to see access become prioritized through, I think, not only the not-for-profit channels but also for-profit channels. And we aren't going to have a classic two-tier system because I think our non-profit healthcare sector will always stand up for people who are vulnerable and to provide them with access. But there's no question in the concierge space that you have to have the money to get the concierge medicine. There's no other way to finance the model.

Shane Tenny (09:54):

Over the last ... I guess it's probably almost 10 years now since President Obama, at the time, started advocating for healthcare reform and the changes that we all know have come into play now. What do you see as the trend or the evolution in medicine over the next 10 years?

Dr. Kevin Mosser (10:10):

I think that we'll see a very intense competition for acute care. I think everybody wants to handle the relatively low risk, fairly easy to manage conditions that doctors have handled for hundreds of years. And we'll see that grow up in all kinds of spaces that combine retail because there's an easy subsidization on the retail side to the professional side. I think one of the things that's overlooked is the fact that from a physician salary standpoint, we're seeing a growing disconnect between the amount of professional fees a doctor generates and their salary.

Dr. Kevin Mosser (10:50):

And one of the consequences of the large scale employment of physicians is that salaries for doctors are becoming more and more market-based. Whereas 25 years ago, what you made as a physician was just dependent upon the professional fees that you could generate. But with competition for doctors and market rates being set by MGMA and other institutions, even despite productivity measurements and productivity incentives, there's still doctors who are being paid actually out of proportion now to what they're able to generate in pro fees.

Dr. Kevin Mosser (11:24):

And that means that if you're going to, for example, get into the business as, say, a CVS might, there's always a subsidy to that physician salary. If they're not that busy, they're not earning the pro fees. And you can easily make that up in the example of CVS through sales of various merchandise as people come into your office. So somewhere, somehow as physician salaries become market-based, you have to look at a larger equation of the finances of employing that physician and look at the other income streams that physician generates other than just professional fees.

Shane Tenny (12:03):

Yeah. Since you brought up compensation and I know we kind of foreshadowed at the beginning here, and it will probably drift into trends in actual providers and burnout and some of those things, I wanted to get your opinion on compensation, and again from my perspective in working with docs around the country, day in and day out, and our team on just their personal planning and goals and that certainly ties into their compensation. We all know that that contracts now are largely production-based or RVU-based or patient satisfaction-based. Is this a good trend or is this one that is exacerbating feelings of frustration or burnout?

Dr. Kevin Mosser (12:44):

Well, first of all...

Shane Tenny (12:45):

Or both?

Dr. Kevin Mosser (12:46):

Yeah. First of all, I have to say there is no perfect compensation system. It's all a matter of what is the perverse incentive that you want to manage. So if you have a productivity-based system, then that puts a lot of pressure on the physicians to hit targets and changes the doctor from seeing the patients at the pace they want to see them and at the quality they want to see them to be a more unit based type of mentality. And I don't think you really want that totally. The gold standard today would be at least a balance. At least 80% of your compensation is production and about 20% are other measures, which might be satisfaction, might be access, might be quality, might be a wide variety. It's different from system to system.

Dr. Kevin Mosser (13:31):

And the problem for a physician who goes on salary is that the organization is likely to have a target for them anyway, and so whether it's hidden within, okay, somebody stops and visits you and says, "Well, I know you're salaried, but boy, your production is really low. We need you to step it up a little bit." It's pretty perverse. I think it's a matter of how you handle it. For me, I don't particularly love production-based care. I think that it's simply an artifact of the strange compensation methodology the systems are under, and it won't go away until the compensation methodology systems you're under are changed, until that incentive to reward the physicians for taking more time with patients becomes so high, say, if you're under a risk arrangement or some other umbrella that you can actually convert them back to salary or to some other form of compensation, panel size, some other methodology.

Shane Tenny (14:30):

And are there any groups or hospital systems or practices that you see that are coming up with innovative compensation models like you're describing?

Dr. Kevin Mosser (14:40):

Yeah, it's really always hard to know exactly what's happening in other organizations, but I know that Geisinger has experimented pretty heavily with salary-based compensation that then measures the doctor in terms of their patient satisfaction, in terms of their access, basically outlining, "Here's what we need doctors to do, we'll reward you for doing that and pay you a salary." I believe Kaiser, pretty typically, uses panel size because of the nature of that particular business as well. And everyone around the country is trying to experiment with can we salary physicians, can we change the pay model? How do we create the incentives? It's really all about aligning incentives.

Dr. Kevin Mosser (15:21):

But pure productivity, in my mind, today, is a killer for physicians and particularly if it's pure productivity in order to raise enough professional fee to cover your salary because that's just a dead end. As anybody listening here knows there has not really been an increase in physician compensation per RVU from payers for a very long time and that has essentially brought pro fee generation too low in order to, in its essence, compete salary-wise for physicians.

Shane Tenny (15:56):

Yeah. I want to continue down that train of thought in just a second when we get back from this break.

Will Koster (16:04):

I'm Will Koster. On this episode's White Coat Wisdom, let's focus on setting goals. Now, I don't want to be a motivational speaker here telling you that you can be anything you set your mind to, but I do agree with the cliche that setting goals is the first step towards reaching your goals. This is true when it comes to financial goals, just like fitness goals, relationship goals, and every other type of goal. It is impossible to know if you have succeeded if you did not have a stated goal or target to begin with.

Will Koster (16:30):

In this segment, I want to highlight a couple benefits of approaching financial planning with a focus on your goals. First and foremost, being clear about your goals will help you be clear about where to spend your money. Having priorities, whether they are traveling, buying a house, saving for retirement or simply enjoying the present will allow you to make sure that your money is going where you truly want to spend it. If you do not have clear goals, it becomes much more difficult to prioritize your spending and saving.

Will Koster (16:57):

Another outcome of having defined financial goals is increased confidence. With clear stated goals, you will inevitably find yourself saying yes to things that move you towards your goal and saying no to the things that will distract you from your goals, which will result in you feeling more confident about the decisions and path that you're on. You'll know that you're on track with the things that you value and that your life isn't being watered down by the things that are depriving you of what's most important.

Will Koster (17:24):

The final benefit I want to highlight of setting goals is increased freedom. This one may not be intuitive right away because it might initially seem more restrictive to say no to the spontaneous weekend trip because it interferes with your savings goal, but in the long run, having these goals does the exact opposite. It allows you the freedom from having your finances control your life. Instead, you take ownership of your finances, which results in a true sense of freedom. I hope these tips encourage you to sit down and map out some of your financial goals. With this episode's White Coat Wisdom, I'm Will Koster.

Shane Tenny (18:01):

Dr Mosser, you recently wrote a guest post for our wellness blog on physicians and organizational dissonance. We'll put links to it in the show notes here. Can you talk a little bit about that topic because I think it's kind of a springboard from what we were just discussing about compensation models and some of, I like your phrase, the perverse incentives that you want to manage? Talk a little bit about that.

Dr. Kevin Mosser (18:28):

Right. So I've talked with many, many physicians who I've employed about what they think about the overall management of the system. And so physicians have a very difficult time. They're incredibly smart, incredibly resilient, incredibly hardworking people, but the world of corporate management is a little bit mysterious to them, and therefore, there's a dissonance in communication often between management and the doctors. So my classic example is if you're running a health system, you know that CVS, maybe Walmart, just about anybody is interested in getting into the physician game in order to win on access.

Dr. Kevin Mosser (19:13):

So most healthcare organizations have huge emphasis on access, easy appointment scheduling, walk-ins, all those kinds of things. Now here's the doctor, their world is in the practice, and they don't have an appointment for three months. And they're working as hard as they can. They're trying to add patients. You're saying we need more access, we need more access and that's not in their world. In their world, they already have too many patients to provide great care for. And so they don't understand why access is a problem. And in their mind, they're also providing great access because they'll see anybody who needs to be seen at any time.

Dr. Kevin Mosser (19:54):

The problem is they'll see anybody who needs to be seen, but they don't have the ability to accommodate anybody who wants to be seen if it's not something that they consider to be that urgent. So as the decision-making moves back to the patient and organizations try to respond to that, it's just completely alien to the world that the physician is working in. So you have a disconnect between what the administrators are saying is important and what the doctors are feeling as important at the point of care.

Shane Tenny (20:25):

And is this topic, again, which you wrote about on our guest blog, is this topic one that is rising to the awareness of hospital executives and physician leaders alike to open a dialogue? Or is it one that most people are not really clear on what's causing this dissonance until they're introduced to the topic?

Dr. Kevin Mosser (20:46):

Yeah, I don't think it's a big enough topic. I think that communication between our doctors and their organization is critical if we're going to address the burnout crisis that we have because the physicians feel unappreciated. They feel overworked. They feel like - another thing I mentioned in the article is that physicians are all about their patients. Their patient is first. It's just ground into you from day one, and so everything revolves around the patient. And so when they see money being spent in a wide variety of different corporate activities that don't make a whole lot of sense to them, and they're struggling for resources from the organization. They feel like they don't have enough resource. They feel completely underappreciated and undervalued.

Dr. Kevin Mosser (21:32):

And when people are constantly coming at them to meet this parameter, that parameter or this parameter, and they don't understand the working life of the physician and there's no listening, they're not creating listening devices, then it adds to the physician's devaluation and can really exacerbate a burnout situation. So that dialogue has to improve, and it's gotten worse, to be honest, as organizations have grown because if you're employing 50 physicians, you can sit down and talk with them on a regular basis. When you're employing 1500, 2000 physicians on a geography where the practices might be five or six hours apart, it's very, very difficult to have a constructive conversation with your physicians. And so this dissonance just makes that problem a lot worse.

Shane Tenny (22:20):

And the burnout issue, which is somewhat ubiquitous these days, and I guess from my opinion, rightfully so because it's one that needs addressing, I'm feeling the story that you're relaying there. And on the physician side, who doesn't understand the vocabulary around organizational dissonance and some of these topics, they just feel frustrated, exhausted and, "My system is spending money on things I don't understand and squeezing it out of me and my compensation." But burnout, it feels personal, and in some aspects it is, but it's not just personal. It's also systemic and system wide, I think would be your perspective, and there's some role that the executives and the administration can play and should play.

Dr. Kevin Mosser (23:06):

Absolutely. I think that this should be a major priority of the CEO and the C suite, and I have a tremendous regret that I didn't see this problem evolving fast enough and take the leadership role I should have within the organization. So the CEO is not going to be the day-to-day worker on this particular project, but first of all, they need to know how their physicians are feeling, and they need to take a leadership role as a voice that creates this as an organizational strategic priority. I've had organizations tell me, for example, that they can't work on burnout because they're going work on becoming a high reliability healthcare organization. Well, if you can't engage your docs, and their doctors are burnt out and making mistakes, you don't have much of a chance of becoming a high reliability organization.

Dr. Kevin Mosser (23:57):

You have to address this fundamental problem, and it takes time. It's going to take years. Dike has a famous saying, Dike Drummond, who you interviewed once I believe. He says this is not a problem with the solution. It's a dilemma that needs to be managed, and so a CEO needs to be sure that his or her organization as a program. He or she needs to be absolutely certain that someone is at point. They need to have a way of listening to their doctors so that they know how their doctors are feeling about things, and they need to drive decision-making through the lens of the day-to-day life and practice of the physicians.

Dr. Kevin Mosser (24:39):

That's where the EHR is a really important in terms of having the strategy to make sure that works. The CEO needs to understand that 80% of burnout is due to system factors and about 20% is due to the fact that physicians are trained to sacrifice everything for their patient and even to their own personal harm, family or health or whatever. And we need to help physicians get beyond that. That's not a very healthy teaching that we grew up with.

Shane Tenny (25:12):

And is the awareness around the critical issue that burnout is and is becoming; is that awareness becoming widespread among hospital executives and CEOs now?

Dr. Kevin Mosser (25:27):

Yeah, I think it is. And about three weeks ago, the National Academy of Medicine, which is the fundamental organization that we produced reports like Crossing the Quality Chasm back in the 90s, just issued a very, very significant white paper and report on physician burnout. And in that report, they have several recommendations that I would ... I don't really have time to go over them now, but certainly they encourage a viable program for managing this issue. And I believe that the publication of that paper is going to get great awareness. And I also believe that over time there'll be incentives for healthcare systems to begin having something in place to actually manage this problem and work with their physicians to overcome the conditions that are causing the burnout.

Shane Tenny (26:18):

Incentives in place from the payers or from the government, or what are you ...

Dr. Kevin Mosser (26:23):

Well, the government is a pretty large payer for [crosstalk 00:26:25], so.

Shane Tenny (26:25):

Well, fair point.

Dr. Kevin Mosser (26:29):

[crosstalk 00:26:27], but I think all payers will pick it up because what they're going to see is lower patient satisfaction, lower subscriber satisfaction from their partner organizations if they're not addressing this problem.

Shane Tenny (26:44):

We're seeing and hearing increased forecast of a shortage of healthcare providers in the coming year, specifically physicians, and I guess by corollary, a lot of opportunity for mid-level providers and extenders, but a shortage of physicians. What do you see as some of the contributing factors or the most significant contributing factors to that?

Dr. Kevin Mosser (27:08):

Well, some of the contributing factors are that we have many, many physicians who are leaving practice in order to tackle administrative roles or take a different kind of job that limits their work because they're experiencing symptoms of burnout. So we see early retirement, we see high physician turnover. We see people just leaving and going into other professions. And we see a huge bolus of physicians trying to get MBAs and see if they can move themselves from a practicing environment into a management environment. If you just look at primary care and you think about the expansion of jobs in primary care due to the urgent care explosion as opposed to the continuity practice space, then we're really seeing a lot of diversion of people away from continuity practice into urgent care.

Dr. Kevin Mosser (28:02):

And the other contributing factor, quite honestly, is that doctors are not recommending their profession with the enthusiasm and the passion that they used to, and I think that's your break everybody's heart. It's a great privilege to be a doctor. You are entering people's lives in ways that nobody else gets to enter them. You develop relationships that are very powerful, and it's pretty sad that we're not recommending that to our own children.

Shane Tenny (28:30):

Do you see, not to ask you a leading question here, but do you see ... at the risk of asking you a leading question, what role do you think the cost of medical school and student loans and the financial stress is on folks choosing the profession?

Dr. Kevin Mosser (28:45):

I think it's significant in this sense, in that ... I had an interesting experience in medical school. Several of my friends called me and asked me to go to dinner and when the bill came they decided to split it, and I didn't have enough money to cover my share. But all of my friends, who had become accountants and financiers and etc, had plenty of money to cover that. I think this gap between how fast you can establish a viable financial life ... the gap between people who choose other professions and people who go into healthcare is widening. And I think that's a deterrent.

Dr. Kevin Mosser (29:24):

You can get through medical school. There are many ways to get through medical school and pay for it. And sometimes people do accommodate the debt. But when you're making choices these days, and I think this will get worse with the next generation who went through the 2008 financial bust and are looking for secure jobs, I think that the choice between not really starting to make your living until you're maybe 27, 28 years old and being able to get right out and get a good job and work on Wall Street, or work in some other discipline, that's going to continue to divert a lot of our great talent away from healthcare events.

Shane Tenny (30:03):

And so what needs to be done to spread the good word about the noble profession that it is and help increase the enrollment to medical school?

Dr. Kevin Mosser (30:13):

Well, I think we have to restore in our doctors, first, the joy of practicing medicine. They need to be evangelists. Nothing else that we do will affect healthcare as much as our physicians being evangelists for the profession and expressing that joy once again.

Shane Tenny (30:29):

Dr Mosser, as our listeners are listening to you as a retired CEO, the one who has seen a lot of change and in some ways, in many ways, I think I'll tip my hat and say sees the landscape today and things that in some ways you wish you'd done differently and in some ways, things that executives need to be doing to care for the physicians who are caring for the country. If our listeners here are listening to you and realizing, "I don't think my CEO gets this. I don't think my director is keyed into this," that, I think, is some of where your organization or the group that you work with, SE Healthcare, is trying to move the needle and make some difference through the physician burnout prevention program and things like that. Can you talk a little bit about that? Help us know what's the resource that you advocate for now?

Dr. Kevin Mosser (31:23):

Sure. We, in brief, tried to create a powerful listening device between the physicians and the C suite of the organization. And we do this through a survey instrument. And I know doctors are sick of taking surveys because they take a 40-question survey, they never hear anything about it. And they are always asked, "Are you burnt out?" They say yes, and then nothing happens. Our instrument is open-ended in many aspects and only 10 questions long and allows the doctor to express themselves to the organization. And that's iterative, so it creates a conversation between the healthcare organization and their doctors.

Dr. Kevin Mosser (32:03):

We create a dashboard for the C suite, and then, in addition, we also create a library of videos that have been filmed by Dike Drummond that help physicians see what burnout really is. It trains them in how to detect it and how to approach their colleagues because we're not enlisting our physicians in this effort either really very effectively. And he gives him a lot of practical tips and trains them on how to better manage their work with a strategy and how to communicate better with senior management. And so the C suite is able to develop their priorities and their approach based on what the doctors are telling them with very little time. It's all transparent back to the doctors. And then the doctors also have the supplement of being trained in an area where we were never trained in and that's how to take better care of yourself, how to relate to the organization, how to manage your EHR with a strategy, and how to help your colleagues when they're experiencing burnout.

Shane Tenny (33:03):

And so SE Healthcare is really working to kind of stand in the gap of both awareness and communication and strategy between executives who want to do something but don't know what to do and providers who want some help but don't know how to get the attention.

Dr. Kevin Mosser (33:19):

Exactly. I was trying to take the randomness out of the approach, trying to get people to stop asking the question, are you burned out, and start asking what is stressing you? What is burning you out? And then developing specific strategies as an organization to address those factors and continually, continually converse with their physicians so that this gets better and better and better. It's at least a three to five-year journey, I believe, for any organization if they're going to approach this problem. And so they need that listening tool, and they need that training in order to be successful.

Shane Tenny (33:50):

Excellent. Well, we certainly want ... I like your phrase about restoring the joy in medicine, and I think that's what the ... it'd be a great accomplishment if we could move the needle there over the next couple of years.

Dr. Kevin Mosser (34:04):

That would certainly be my dream, that's for sure.

Shane Tenny (34:07):

Absolutely. Well, Dr Mosser, thanks so much for giving us your time today, your perspective, your expertise, and we'll include links in the show notes to the guest post that Dr Mosser wrote on our blog. We'll also include links to the SE Healthcare website, and you can track him down. If you're realizing that you'd like this CEO to talk to your CEO, then we'll make sure you know how to find them. So thanks again.

Dr. Kevin Mosser (34:29):

Great. Thank you.

Will Koster (34:34):

I'm Will Koster bringing you this episode's White Coat Achievement, a segment where we highlight noteworthy achievements by your friends and colleagues.

Will Koster (34:42):

We are all guilty of reacting in certain situations due to implicit bias. This term refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions and decisions in an unconscious manner. Dr. Quinn Capers is this episode's White Coat Achiever, not only for his clinical excellence and innovation but for his transformative leadership in academic medicine.

Will Koster (35:04):

Dr. Quinn Capers is an interventional cardiologist. He's also the professor of medicine and dean of faculty at Ohio State Medical School. This vocal leader has paved the way for minorities in medicine. In 2013, he introduced innovations to reduce bias in the admissions process through implementing an implicit association test. Admissions committee members were asked to take the test, which uncovers hidden racial and gender biases. The year following this exercise, the admissions committee selected the most diverse class in Ohio State Medical School's history.

Will Koster (35:38):

Dr. Capers often leverages Twitter to spread the word about implicit bias while sharing his humor from his personal life. He also shares regular videos of him doing pushups with the hashtag drop and give me 20. Though pushups have little to do with implicit bias, this cardiologist has shown consistency for more than three years with his pushup hashtag challenge. This has helped him build a following far beyond Ohio State to get his message out. We will link to Dr. Capers' content in the show notes for you.

Will Koster (36:06):

As always, if you know someone who is wearing a white coat and is achieving something noteworthy, please let us know. We'd love to feature them on a future episode, but again, this episode's White Coat Achievement goes to Dr. Quinn Capers who is calling attention to the issue of implicit bias and promoting diversity in medicine.

Shane Tenny (36:24):

Thanks so much for joining us today. We've got more episodes queued up and ready to roll in the coming weeks and months. Please don't forget to track us down. You can Google search White Coat Wellness and find us on Instagram, on Twitter, on Facebook. We'd love to connect with you there. If you have suggestions for topics that you'd like to hear about or guests that you'd like me to interview, you can email me directly, Shane@whitecoatwell.com. Thanks so much. We'll see you back here next time.

Speaker 2 (36:53):

This episode of White Coat Wellness is over, but you're not alone on your journey towards financial wellness. Spaugh Dameron Tenny has been helping physicians and dentists with their financial planning for over 60 years, and we'd love to answer any questions that would be of help to you. Visit sdtplanning.com today and take your financial wellness to new levels. Once again, that's sdtplanning.com, and we'll see you on the next episode of White Coat Wellness.

Speaker 2 (37:17):

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