CoxHealth and Journeys Metabolic Partner to Tackle Metabolic Disease. Read press release here.
We know how exhausting it is to be a healthcare provider in today’s challenging environment. You face many demands and pressures that can take a toll on your mental and physical health. You may feel overwhelmed, detached, and unfulfilled by your work. These are signs and symptoms of burnout, and it’s a serious problem that affects you and your patients. Burnout can make you more prone to make medical errors while diminishing your compassion and satisfaction in providing patient care. Ultimately, burnout can push providers to leave the world of medicine altogether. Beyond you, burnout can also reduce patient satisfaction, increase staff turnover, and limit access to care. It is evident a solution to better support providers must be created in order to ensure the future of healthcare for all.
If you’re a primary care provider, you may feel like this every day: You’re working long hours, seeing more patients than you can handle, and dealing with endless paperwork and administrative tasks. You’re constantly juggling competing demands, trying to keep up with the latest guidelines, and worrying about missing something important. You’re feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, and stretched too thin.
If you feel like you’re drowning in patient care and can’t seem to catch up on your workload, you aren’t alone. A 2022 study conducted by researchers from the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University, and Imperial College London found that primary care physicians would need 26.7 hours per day to provide all the recommended care for their patients, according to national guidelines.
Many providers like you are facing the same challenges and experiencing the same burnout. You deserve better. You deserve more time for patient care and self-care. You deserve more support and recognition. You deserve more joy and meaning in your work. We are here with you. We understand what you are going through, and we want to help you find a way out.
One of the major drivers of burnout is the fee-for-service (FFS) payment model, which rewards providers for the volume of services they deliver, regardless of their outcomes or value. The complexity of patients augments the challenges providers are faced with in providing timely, efficient, and yet comprehensive care. Most patients have multiple comorbid disease states, such as diabetes, hypertension, and heart failure compounded by a debilitating state of depression. These patients require more time, attention, and expertise to manage their conditions and prevent complications. They also need more personalized and holistic care that takes into account their preferences, values, and goals. However, the current health care system does not adequately support providers to deliver this kind of care. Instead, it rewards quantity over quality, and incentivizes providers to see more patients in less time. This creates a mismatch between the needs of the patients and the resources of the providers, leading to frustration, stress, and burnout. It puts pressure on providers to see more patients in less time, compromising their ability to build relationships, engage patients, and provide optimal care.
The transition from FFS to value-based care (VBC) is a potential solution to reduce burnout and improve health care quality and cost. VBC is a payment model that aligns provider reimbursement with the value of care they provide, measured by quality, patient experience, and cost. One of the strategies that can facilitate the transition from fee-for-service to value-based care in medicine is team-based care. Team-based care is a strategy that involves two or more health providers from different disciplines working collaboratively with patients and their caregivers to achieve shared goals and coordinated, high-quality care. The same study found that team-based care reduced the time a physician needed to deliver care from 26.7 hours a day to just 9.3 hours a day.
But, transitioning to team-based care is not a simple or quick solution for most providers. Creating and implementing a care team requires a lot of operational support, such as hiring, training, and coordinating different health professionals, as well as redesigning workflows, processes, and systems. Many providers, especially those who work in health systems and large physician groups, do not have the resources, authority, or flexibility to make such changes. Moreover, providers are already overwhelmed by their daily workload, and may not have the time or energy to engage in such a transformation. Therefore, team-based care may not be feasible or realistic for many providers in the near or immediate future.
You want to provide high-quality, patient-centered care that improves health outcomes and lowers costs, but you don’t have enough time or resources to do so. You know that nutrition and lifestyle interventions are essential for preventing and managing chronic diseases, but you can’t possibly counsel every patient on these topics in the few minutes you have with them. How can you bridge this gap and transition to value-based care without disrupting your workflow? One possible solution is to extend care into your patients home by opening the door to digital therapeutics.
Digital therapeutics are evidence-based interventions that deliver personalized and tailored coaching, feedback, and support to patients through digital platforms. They can help patients manage their conditions, change their behaviors, and improve their health outcomes. They can also help providers monitor their patients’ progress, provide feedback and support, and adjust treatment plans as needed. Digital therapeutics can serve as a low-burden solution for providers who want to offer comprehensive and holistic care to their patients, without adding more tasks or time to their already overwhelming schedules. By using digital therapeutics, you can empower your patients to take charge of their health without derailing your workflow or increasing your never ending task list.
Journeys Metabolic offers a comprehensive digital therapeutic solution that enables health systems, physician groups, providers, and patients to improve metabolic outcomes. We are driven to be the conduit to end the metabolic crises at scale. Our current focus is to educate both providers and their patients so we can collectively reverse a multitude of metabolic disease states such as type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, NAFLD, and their common accompanying comorbid conditions such as depression. Journeys Metabolic delivers customized education to your patients driven through personalized, biomarker-data-driven feedback through a mobile app providing users with interactive support. Our digital intervention creates sustainable behavior change, serving as the necessary mechanism to improve metabolic disease long-term. Our HITRUST interoperability enables us to communicate through your electronic health records, allowing you to track your patients’ progress, offer feedback and support, and adjust treatment plans as needed. Journeys Metabolic was physician-developed as a solution to enhance patient care while simultaneously supporting the provider struggling to reach their often unfeasible and unsustainable work demands. Our vision is to empower both patients and their providers as a mechanism to optimize care and capture outcomes as we journey to the developing world of value-based care. Ultimately, it is our mission to be the bridge to get you there.
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