Emergency Medicine
Dear physician colleagues,
My dad recently decided to hang up his white coat after a successful 48-year career practicing medicine. Despite still enjoying seeing patients, the reality of being a physician today took its toll. His personal satisfaction with practicing ran up against increasing layers of administration and bureaucracy. He also simply ran the numbers: The rising costs of practicing, coupled with declining physician reimbursement rates, made it no longer financially lucrative to continue.
71,000 physicians left medicine in 2021-2022. What’s more, surveys suggest this trend is particularly apparent amongst younger physicians just starting out. More than half of medical students don’t want to practice medicine as their career. This should alarm us all: We need doctors who are smart, dedicated, hard-working, and committed to the profession.
No one can deny that medicine has become more onerous, bureaucratic, and less enjoyable over the past decade. As a practicing emergency physician myself, I’ve seen discussions dramatically shift amongst friends and colleagues, particularly as most of us have become employees: Is this hospital offering me fair compensation? Should I negotiate for a higher salary? Can anyone help me deal with this frustrating EHR, this inane prior auth, or this medical board complaint? Should I get out of medicine altogether? What are my alternative options?
These are complicated questions with no easy answers, but I’ve asked myself what I can do to help solve them for the long-term health of our profession. What I think we need – and yes, this is a very doctor-y approach — is two-fold:
That is why I’m proud to introduce Offcall – a new physician-only platform which intends to deliver on these promises. Making an account on Offcall is free. We are proud to be financially backed by dozens of physicians who share our belief in the need for a new platform that drives positive change for our profession. At the get-go, we are building:
What sets Offcall apart is our commitment to physician-led data and our focus on both professional and personal aspects of medical careers. It’s my profound hope that Offcall can improve physicians’ lives and careers and help make practicing medicine more enjoyable.
Sign up here to test drive our beta version — it’s free to make an account, and you can share your data 100% confidentially and anonymously with your colleagues. By joining Offcall, you’re not just improving your own career, you’re also helping to reshape the future of medicine for all of us.
Sincerely,
Graham Walker, MD