National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month - Physician Burnout Crisis

Hello, I'm Erica Linsford. I'm here with Dr. Eric Kaufman with C3 Health Park. Harry, you're the CEO of this company. For those who don't know about it, can you talk about that weight that comes with taking care of other people? Yeah, there's a huge weight and a lot of people aren't aware that we have a couple of things that are driving against us as headwinds in the healthcare industry. Number one, physicians have the highest suicide rate of any profession in the United States. And if you look at what happens each and every year, an equivalent of two medical school classes takes their own life each and every year from the toll of taking care of others. And we also have a very high burnout rate, meaning the existing clinicians that are taking care of patients, the burnout rate is over 50%. And what that means for you, Erica, is that when you're in the room with a clinician, they don't even have the empathy to be able to engage with you. And we want to bring the joy of practice back to medicine. And so part of what we're focused on is ensuring that we provide services for clinicians that are in our network. So we actually have one-on-one individualized coaching with another physician to help clinicians navigate some of those challenges. We do a three-month engagement. We don't charge the clinicians anything for this. What we want to see is we want to see their careers extended. We want to see them be in a position where they can practice longer, take care of those patients where they have those relationships. When you think about female physicians, they have a 200 to 400% higher incidence of suicide than the female population generally in the United States. And we also have a shortage of clinicians in this country. So we're going to be between 20,000 and 40,000 primary care clinicians short by the time we hit 2035 in a country where we have an aging population at the same time. So there's more people with more chronic conditions at the same time that we have less clinicians, we have burnout, and we have a high suicide rate. So this really is a healthcare crisis.