Medicine Forward Update 3/14/23

LA Burnout Symposium and Beyond

Wellbeing as Our Foundation

The burnout symposium in LA was amazing. I met some wonderful new friends, and was incredibly inspired by the shared energy to make the world of medicine a better place. Those of you that know me know that public speaking doesn’t come easy for me. But, I had a story burning inside me that I knew I needed to get out.

So I did (click to listen to my story).

It took much practice and help from an entire village. This included hiring a story coach introduced by Emily Silverman and an Internal Family Systems therapist. And, it was all worth it. I was blown away by the positive response. I had been holding my own peak burnout experience inside me and was afraid to talk about it publicly. I felt shame. I felt scared. And, I thought it was my fault. My support team (including

Kim Lucas

, who joined me at the conference) helped me realize that my harsh inner critic was telling me things that just weren’t true. Not only that, but it was holding me back from talking bout something that is not only about me. It’s about all of us. If a person who is this passionate about disrupting burnout can’t get real about my deepest fears and most challenging experiences, how can I expect us to make meaningful progress on a global burnout epidemic?

I’m so grateful for the help I had and the opportunity to attend and speak at the symposium. It was a highlight of my year for sure. I’d like to share a few highlights with you:

1. Dinner with Christina Maslach herself. I sat right next to her and had a lovely and lively conversation. She is such a powerful champion for “fixing the coal mine, not the canary”. I’d been wanting to give her a Fight Burnout shirt for years, and finally got my chance. She loved it and that felt great to honor her with it.

2. I met Katie Cole, Tammie Chang, Sadie Eilsseau, and Nina Bianchi. These women are forces of nature for well-being. We will be meeting again to talk about how to sustain connection and momentum between live events like the symposium. Nina shared a great book called “Thriving on Disruption”, where I was introduced to Agency & Pathways of Hope Theory. You’ll want to check this out:

   Gabe Charbonneau, MD 🇺🇸 @gabrieldane

   Medicine needs #hope in a big way. Here’s an interesting framework about hope coming from a sense of #agency from positive psychology’s Charles Richard Snyder: 🧵/x

   

3. I met Dawn Clark, Chief Wellness Officer at Kaiser Permanente physicians group in Southern California. She’s put together an incredibly moving project to get physician leaders sharing their stories about mental health and is really moving the needle on culture.

4. Gave away 50 Fight Burnout shirts! 🔥

5. I got to pitch the burnout assessment we created in collaboration with Yerbo with the entire conference. It was very well received, and did just what I hoped — got people activated to have conversations about innovative ways to shine the light on burnout.

   1. Here’s a link to the assessment for anyone to take. It’s anonymous, quick, and easy, and the report gives actionable insights. This is based on the same one that I’ve been checking on myself weekly for the last two years: https://medicineforward.org/burnout

   2. Here’s a link to the report from the survey we did live at the conference for those who are curious about what we found: https://medicineforward.org/s/Burnout-Symposium-Dashboard-2-23-23.pdf

   3. Omar Shaker
      has advised doing a periodic assessment of Medicine Forward members with this tool, and using it as part of our learning of how we lead as a wellbeing-first organization. I love this idea.

   4. Here’s me giving my pitch:

Zero Friction from Prior Auth by 2025

Some exciting news on the prior auth front. Gray TV is the second-largest TV broadcaster in the nation. They reach 36% of US households. Emily Featherston came to Montana to interview me about Medicine Forward and prior auth. I talked about our foundation of advocating for the patient-physician relationship, the Seniors Timely Access To Care Act, and our collaboration with ACP to make it better. It will air March 20th.

The timing is good, as Kaiser Health News just published this yesterday, “Feds Move to Rein In Prior Authorization, a System That Harms and Frustrates Patients”.

Things are heating up. Perhaps our moonshot of zero friction by 2025 isn't out of reach?!!!

Growing our Grassroots Movement

I want to share what I’ve been hyper-focused on lately — our strategy for Medicine Forward to be a sustainable organization and movement. Lisa Scardina continues to be just the partner I needed to work on this together. She’s put together a proposal for potential funding through a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation health equity grant. Our goal is to submit the first proposal by the end of this week.

Highlights include:

• The Medicine Forward fellowship program. A selective program to identify physicians across the country to serve as faculty within Medicine Forward’s framework. To broaden the impact of individual physicians as well as across communities as physicians advocate for positive change.

• Continued support for national and local advocacy on issues like prior auth.

• Expansion of PEERS. The trainee-led peer-support program that’s had promising initial outcomes at Mt. Sinai.

• A National Summit. Coordinated facilitated meetings using the principles of Appreciative Inquiry to engage the whole system in creating a vision and design plan for system change with a focus on health equity.

• Coaching resources.

• Funding for Medicine Forward sustainability.

We’ve been having many conversations about how this organization can best serve you and our mission. In addition to the grant we’re working on:

• An update to our governance including a reboot of our 501c3 board charter and bylaws.

• A system for how we propose ideas and vote on them.

• A concept of what makes Medicine Forward different in how we approach advocacy: "Empowered Decentralized Bottom-up Advocacy" (more to come).

• Further conversations on Clubhouse to build our network and increase agency.

• A continued quest to improve how we work together and best communicate.

• A t-shirt design candidate to showcase our intent to prioritize wellbeing-first, and our interdependence:

  

• A pitch for how we might visually update the quadruple aim to showcase that not all priorities have equal importance. Wellbeing is foundational:

  Gabe Charbonneau, MD 🇺🇸 @gabrieldane

  What if we upgraded the #quadrupleaim to put wellbeing as the foundation that everything else builds on? Not all priorities are created equally. @SusanHingle @PDX_Tom

  

• Continue pursuit of our goal to reach sustainability by September.

• Get our members activated: a plan of agency & hope for every member!

• Convening an open house on Zoom.

Next Steps

We wouldn’t be Medicine Forward without a plan for momentum. Thank you for reading this update, and for all of your continued encouragement and support. Our “Traction Team” continues to meet biweekly to discuss how we can best advance our mission. Please share anything that spoke to you in this post on Twitter and tag @MedicineForward.

Cheers!
-Gabe

New friends pitching their best ideas for how to disrupt burnout at the symposium