Can Blockchain Help Reduce Physician Burnout? — Yes, But Only If Done Correctly
By: Dr. Alex Cahana
Tags: Health, Healthcare, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Digital Marketing

In an earlier post I mentioned that health information technology (HIT) has made physician lives harder (below). Yet the medical digital market continues to expand at a vertiginous rate of 200 new applications per day(!) and with over 350,000 health apps, 400 wearables and 3.5 billion downloads, it is impossible to follow the space.

Less than a third of physicians think EHRs help in decreasing the workload (Source here)

Digital sensors are improving constantly, transforming medical devices like asthma inhalers and insulin pens into smart devices that are able to track usage and encourage adherence (or so they promise).

The digital health market is growing exponentially (IQVIA Digital Health Report, November 2017)

The hope is that this constant collection of real world data through connected sensors, wearables and mobile devices will create “digital biomarkers” that will predict, track and assess the effect of treatments on specific diseases.

The evidence, we hope, is on its way.

The effects of digital apps are most promising in diabetes, depression and anxiety (Same source)

#3. Blockchain can be a powerful solution if designed to promote professional fulfillment

To understand how blockchain technology can help reduce physician burnout, one needs to understand its roots. As the name implies, physicians suffering from burnout feel as though a fire that once burned inside them has dwindled and perhaps even entirely extinguished. They report a sense of having “run out of gas,” as though they “have nothing left.” This decreased enthusiasm for work and growing cynicism is the manifestation of a low sense of personal accomplishment.

This is happening because medicine is not a job. It is not even a career. At its heart, medicine is a calling.

Therefore the response to burnout by recommending coping strategies focusing on the reduction of stress is dissatisfying and does not get to the problem’s real roots. (It is like providing symptomatic relief to a patient with chronic pain without ever addressing the underlying suffering or encouraging the development of life habits that foster a positive state of well-being).

Instead of merely reducing the bad in medical practice, we need to enhance the Good.

The use of monetary incentives alone to encourage physicians to deliver high care value is faulty as well and explains why Value-Based-Care initiatives are only partially adopted and less successful than envisioned.

Thus, blockchain technology has a unique opportunity to design a decentralized economy where the incentive’s focus is on promoting professional fulfillment. These incentive elements include professional recognition, social ranking and temporally tying financial rewards to meaningful institutional and community efforts (below).

Self-interest alone does not explain economic behavior and economic incentives should not be solely designed for financial self-interest. Successful incentives result from a complex interaction of self-interest and cultural intelligence, as reflected in the professional norms that enable human cooperation in a large-scale society.

If incentives are designed correctly, blockchain will not be just another technology, but a platform on which the medical profession can thrive. The alternative to that, as expressed by the prominent American physician Sir William Osler, is grim.