Originally published in Medical Economics

By Jeff Goldsmith and Chuck Peck, M.D.

Though many analysts, including one of us, have pointed the finger at the electronic health record as a major cause of physician burnout, the root cause may lie deeper. In the disappearance of collegiality, the fragmentation of physician communities, and a feeling of disempowerment by physicians in the future of the health systems they work with.

Connectedness and social capital in physician communities has withered as an increasing percentage of physicians no longer use the hospital to practice medicine and nothing has taken its place. Physicians everywhere feel that things are being done to them, rather than the other way around.

Medical care is hard work, made harder for procedural specialists by repetition and for primary care physicians by the frustrating challenges of patient-inflicted medical risk. However, in the past twenty years, physician communities have both fragmented and dispersed geographically.

Read the full article in Medical Economics

Jeff Goldsmith is president of Health Futures, Inc., and Chuck Peck, MD, is a managing director at Navigant, a Guidehouse Company.