Doctors Are Just As Frustrated As Patients

“I just love dealing with human beings. I love them smiling. I love them being happier. I love them chasing their dreams. And if you’re sick and not feeling good, you can’t pursue your dreams.”

—Greg Brannon, MD, founder and medical director of Optimal Bio, author of Restore

The waiting periods.

There are at least two of them, and they can be the most frustrating aspects of needing healthcare in the United States.

First, there’s the long wait just to get an appointment with a provider. It can take months to get in the door.

Second, once you’re in the door, there’s that long wait in the lobby.

These are two of the many frustrations of the experience of being a patient in the U.S. healthcare system. People often blame the doctor’s office, the staff, or the physicians themselves for these inconveniences.

But in this article, two physicians talk about why they share those same frustrations that patients have—and why both of those wait times cannot be improved until we overhaul the U.S. healthcare system.

This is article 11 in a 14-part weekly series, in which I am sharing insights from the 2024 Healthcare in the Age of Personalization Summit. We heard from a wide range of healthcare experts—leaders spanning all facets of healthcare organizations from the boardroom and C-suite to the patient’s bedside. We covered topics such as why personalization is important, how we can shape our organizational cultures to facilitate it, how to inject personalization into your employer brand, why better care requires honoring individuality, and what CEOs can learn about personalization from nurses[KP1] .

In this article I’ll share highlights from the panel discussion about how to improve the patient experience.

Panelists included:

• Julie Ann Woodward, MD, chief of oculofacial surgery at Duke Health
• Greg Brannon, MD, founder and medical director of Optimal Bio, author of Restore

Full disclosure: both Dr. Woodward and Dr. Brannon are my own physicians. I’m practicing what I preach. We’ve gotten to know each other as individuals, sharing our struggles within this industry. So I invited them to share their expert insights at the summit.

First, both Dr. Woodward and Dr. Brannon emphasized that they have their own frustrations with the difference between how they want to treat patients versus the realities of the business today.

“Nothing makes me happier than having happy patients,” said Dr. Woodward. “We’re doing our best. We want to see you. We want to take care of you. It makes us feel good to do that.”

Dr. Brannon agreed.

“I just love dealing with human beings,” he said. “I love them smiling. I love them being happier. I love them chasing their dreams. And if you’re sick and not feeling good, you can’t pursue your dreams.”

So, what gets in the way? The rising cost of healthcare, and the many burdens of our complicated system.

Need Resources for Equipment and Staff

Dr. Woodward explained that those two frustrating wait times are largely due to a lack of resources for the necessary equipment and staff—both of which affect their ability to see more patients.

“Studies are showing that if you do a cost analysis over time, physicians are being paid about 25% less than we were 10 years ago,” said Dr. Woodward. “It’s not just our personal pocket that upsets us, it’s the ability to pay staff and to have the tools we need to take care of our patients. Sometimes physicians have anxiety because we’re afraid if an important piece of equipment breaks and we have to wait a year or more to replace it. We just want to have all of our tools that we need, everything from Q-tips and gauze to major pieces of capital equipment to do our best job taking care of patients.”

She said this lack of resources creates a crunch on the entire health system in general.

“The only way we can make up for it is seeing more patients,” she said. “If I used to see 20 patients in a half of a day, 10 years ago, now I may have to see 30 patients. That makes the wait times longer for patients to get in. It makes the wait time longer for the patients in the lobby. We have patients who are sick, who are depressed, and they need a lot of handholding, and we want to be able to have time to do those things.”

Another added stressor: online reviews.

“Patients are very happy with their care, but they may be upset about wait time to get in or a wait time in the office,” said Dr. Woodward. “Those are usually the things that pull down those online review scores. The scores are not always necessarily reflective of the physician’s care, yet a lot of physician management groups and also universities are contemplating using those scores to pay the physician bonuses.”

The Standardization is Out of Control

Dr. Brannon said one of the things that gets in the way is bureaucracy—the standardized processes imposed on the system, which create a lot of work and additional costs for healthcare providers.

“They have great intentions, but they have this bureaucrat trying to make these little boxes for us,” said Dr. Brannon. “We [physicians] have to first make decisions based upon these hurdles, not what’s best for the client. That’s the problem, the layers upon layers upon layers.”

That standardization makes it harder to honor the humanity in each individual—the goal we’ve been exploring throughout this entire series.

“We’re all humans,” said Dr. Brannon. “The humanity is key, not the percentile, not the quartile, not this group or standardization of groups. When you look in somebody’s eyes and you look at them as a human, that’s where things happen. The magic of interpersonal relationship occurs. We cannot lose the focus on the individual. I’m a huge believer in liberty, but liberty demands responsibility. And when given the tools and the opportunity, the knowledge, then people can make decisions that are best for themselves.”

One challenge: the process required to keep electronic records. It’s a requirement that interrupts that person-to-person interaction that’s so crucial.

“The electronic records bother me,” he said, “because when you just go look at the record, the boxes filled out, you miss out on seeing how the family’s reacting, how the patient’s truly feeling. That’s why these little boxes bother me. It’s better to make rounds every morning. You see how the patients are doing, how the team was, how the patient was the night before. All those things are interpersonal relationship communications. We’re lacking that with standardization.”

He asked the question at the heart of how to improve the U.S. healthcare system: “How do we continue the standardization in the sense of collecting data so we can learn from that, but never lose the interpersonal communication?”

He shared one way his own company is trying to tackle that challenge.

“At Optimal Bio, we meet every Tuesday as a team, including the health providers and the management team,” he said. “We have about 50 employees. The providers of healthcare and the team that runs the business talk every day.”

He said everyone is considered to have an ownership stake in the patient experience.

“When you answer the phone, you’re helping a patient,” said Dr. Brannon. “When you answer a lab result, you’re helping a patient. When you’re advertising, you’re helping a patient. We’re here to educate so people have the knowledge to make a decision.”

The Shortage Will Get Worse

Dr. Woodward shared what’s at stake.

“They’re predicting an extreme shortage of surgeons over the next 10 years,” she said. “It’s going to be harder and harder for patients to be taken care of when they need surgical care. We need more physicians.”

The shortage is already so severe it’s affecting the health of physicians.

“Doctors are working as hard as they can,” said Dr. Woodward. “Come lunch, we’re shaking because we’re hungry. I know more than one doctor who has stretched their bladder out from not taking enough breaks during the day. We really want to take good care of you, but we don’t want to be so overburdened that we’re damaging our own health.”

What can be done? Dr. Woodward share one idea: medical schools can allow more students in.

“It’s very difficult to get into medical school,” she said. “I have colleagues whose children have 4.0 grade point averages, they’ve published, they’ve done volunteer work, and they’re being told they need to take one or two gap years to do extra research just to be able to get in.”

We need more doctors, but it’s more than that.

“There’s no space to put more doctors,” said Dr. Woodward. “There’s not enough operating rooms. And the biggest problem is, we need more nurses. There’s not enough people going into nursing. Even if we do build more operating rooms, are we going to be able to hire enough nurses to staff all the surgeries that need to be done?”

It’s a huge snowball effect. Right now, that momentum feels ominous. But it is possible to shift momentum in a new direction.

Dr. Woodward talked about the momentum of morale, at the personal level.

“Morale comes from the top,” said Dr. Woodward. “If whoever’s at the top is not a positive energy person, it trickles down that way. When everybody’s in a good mood, we’re able to take better care of our patients. And that’s absolutely our number one goal. Nothing makes us happier than having happy patients.”

Now we just need to create that positive momentum at the systemic level.

Watch this short video for more from the panel.

Next time: How to earn patient trust by building genuine relationships that focus on being authentic, inclusive, and empathic.