Webinar: Improving clinician wellbeing through systems change

Increasingly high rates of burnout among clinicians pose significant threats to patient outcomes, care delivery, healthcare costs, and employees’ mental health. Despite much research into interventions for improving personal resilience, burnout rates among clinicians continue to rise.

However, less attention has been placed on the role of the overarching system – at both the national and individual healthcare organization level – in contributing to and providing potential solutions for this ongoing crisis.

This panel will discuss a structural approach to enhancing clinician wellbeing by placing a focus on the role of the system over individual resilience, and will explore the interplay of policy and economics in shaping the operational realities of clinical practice. Importantly, panelists will provide action-oriented recommendations to improve clinical wellbeing at both the health system and national levels.

Attendees will discover:

• Benefits of a systems approach to clinical wellbeing
• Strategies for healthcare organizations to reframe clinician wellbeing as an operational priority
• Opportunities for innovation at the national health policy level to improve outcomes and experience for patients and providers

Wayne Jonas, MD
President
Healing Works Foundation

Dr. Wayne Jonas, president of Healing Works Foundation, is a board-certified, practicing family physician. As former director of the National Institutes of Health Office of Alternative Medicine and the World Health Organization Center for Traditional Medicine, Dr. Jonas is an expert in the field of integrative, whole person care and healthcare delivery. He is a widely published scientific investigator who has set the bar for evidence-based research on pain and stress. With more than 40 years of experience, Dr. Jonas incorporates evidence-based healing into his patient care and is dedicated to helping other clinicians find ways to incorporate self-care into their own lives.

Christine Sinsky, MD
Vice President, Professional Satisfaction
American Medical Association

Dr. Sinsky is vice president of professional satisfaction at the American Medical Association. A general internist, she practiced at Medical Associates Clinic in Dubuque, Iowa, for 32 years. Dr. Sinsky is a former director for the American Board of Internal Medicine and a former chair of the ABIM Foundation Board of Trustees. She currently serves on the National Academy of Medicine’s Action Collaborative on Clinician Well-Being.

Dr. Sinsky leads initiatives at the American Medical Association to improve opportunities for joy, purpose and meaning in work for physicians and their teams. Publications on The Quadruple Aim, Joy in Practice, Texting while Doctoring and Creating a Manageable Cockpit for Clinicians have contributed to the national conversation. She has also contributed to research regarding the prevalence, drivers and solutions to burnout among physicians and to resources for individual physicians and for health systems to improve practice efficiency and organizational culture.

Hoangmai Pham, MD
President
Institute for Exceptional Care

Hoangmai (Mai) H. Pham is president of Institute for Exceptional Care, a non-profit dedicated to transforming healthcare for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Dr. Pham is a general internist and national health policy leader. She was vice president at Anthem, responsible for value-based care initiatives. Prior to Anthem, Dr. Pham served as Chief Innovation Officer at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, where she was a founding official, and the architect of foundational programs on accountable care organizations and primary care. Dr. Pham has published extensively on provider payment policy and its intersection with health disparities, quality performance, provider behavior, and market trends. She serves on the boards of Atlantic Health System and the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care. She also serves on numerous advisory bodies including for the National Academy of Medicine, the National Advisory Council for the Agency on Healthcare Research and Quality, the Maryland Primary Care Program. Dr. Pham is most proud of mothering two sons, one of whom is autistic. Her clinical experience is grounded in primary care for underserved populations. She earned her AB from Harvard University, her MD from Temple University, and her MPH. from Johns Hopkins University, where she was also a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar.

Bryant Adibe, MD
Sugarman Practitioner in Residence, School of Public and International Affairs
Princeton University

Dr. Adibe is a Sugarman Practitioner in Residence in the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Previously, Dr. Adibe served as system vice president and chief wellness officer at Rush University System for Health in Chicago. He also held the distinction of off-site, full professor of organizational change and leadership at the University of Southern California. At Rush, he founded the Center for Clinical Wellness, an innovative facility designed to study and treat the effects of burnout and emotional exhaustion on healthcare workers. His work has been featured by the National Academy of Medicine, American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association and other leading outlets.

Dr. Adibe is a graduate of Cambridge University. He earned his medical degree from the University of Florida College of Medicine. He completed clinical clerkships in emergency medicine at both Harvard Medical School and the Stanford School of Medicine. As a graduate student, he studied health policy and evidence-based healthcare at Oxford University.

Healing Works Foundation’s mission is to make whole person, integrative care regular and routine. Led by Dr. Wayne Jonas, Healing Works Foundation partners with a diverse group of wellbeing innovators. It creates platforms, processes, programs, tools and services to support and magnify insights and innovations in healing and whole person care principally in primary care and oncology.