Flexplans for MDs

I have become convinced that when it comes to work-life balance in medicine, you can structure the hours however you like shift work/call, but ultimately it comes down to how many patients you can comfortably manage as a provider which should be up to each physician to determine for themselves. Interestingly this goes to a huge area of cost on the hospital financial side namely the tension between every increasing demands of hospitals to churn more volume and “decrease” costs and efficiency by working the docs harder which leads to hospital turnover and decreased continuity of care. What if we had a system where physicians could adjust how many patients they see? I suppose this happens already in primary care. And from at least one of the studies looking at physician job satisfaction, it certainly seems like office based practices where it may be easier to titrate ones cases rather than high paying high volume practices (hard to turn down emergency room volume, trauma surgery cases) lead to less job satisfaction

http://www.medfriends.org/job_satisfaction.htm

Maybe pain medicine is starting to look a bit better!