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Hello, and welcome to the Becker's Healthcare podcast
recorded live at the 21st annual ASC and
Spine Conference in Chicago.
I'm joined today by doctor Jamon Shah, medical
director at Mercyhealth Pain Center. Jamon, thank you
very much for joining us today on the
show. Could you begin by telling us a
little bit about yourself and your role in
your organization?
Sure. Sure. So I'm a interventional pain physician.
I came from an engineering
background and also was a pharmacist for a
while, worked in the retail setting,
also managed a multimillion dollar pharmacy,
and then switched over to medical school, went
to medical school, paid for it using my
pharmacy earnings. So continue working, basically, and then,
was anis I went in my anesthesia residency
and then an interventional pain fellowship at Loyola
University in Chicago.
And I practice mostly interventional pain, currently.
So throughout your career,
how has the patient provider dynamic evolved over
time?
So it's changed quite a bit, and, you
know, yeah, I have to look back to
when I started, you know, as a pharmacist
and how it evolved through medical school and,
you know, what I saw,
our preceptors doing.
It used to be what we would,
you know, call a priestly type of relationship
where
patients will come to a doctor and say,
doctor, tell me what I need to do.
Whatever you say is, you know, I trust
you, and I'll do whatever you say to
where we started getting patients more involved in
the decision making process
and and went to what I think some
people describe as an engineering type of model
where they're more involved in their decisions.
Me as a physician, my job is to
tell them what their options are, educate them
on things that we can do, and then
let them decide what they wanna do, more
of an informed patient
making a decision model.
So with
the increasing cost of health care
and, you know, the the ease of inconvenience
of people going out and searching for their
own medical answers on
Google or social media or whatever, you know,
we've seen an increasing trend in that. Can
you tell us a little bit about what
you're seeing and why you think that
is? Well, there's a few reasons for that.
You know? 1st and foremost, it's cheap. It's
free. You can go on and turn it
and search for anything.
Sometimes you can find what you're looking for.
So not necessarily what you need to hear,
but what you're looking for, and then you
start
using that advice out of context a lot
of times. And so there's good and bad
to come out of there. Good news is,
yes, it is,
patients are more educated now. They do their
research, which is excellent.
But the problem is a lot of times
what they're reading and, what they think they're
reading is different. What, they're usually taking it
out of context. The implications
are,
you know,
their trust for the,
physician is a little bit different because now
they read something else that's said something opposite
of what their doctor's recommending, and they automatically
start thinking that the doctor's lying to them
or not telling them the full truth.
So it has eroded the relationship a little
bit, but at the same time,
if you guide them properly and if you
talk to them and educate them,
it actually is a good thing because a
lot of times patients do educate themselves on
their pain conditions. Then you can guide and
say these are proper websites to use, to
learn about your condition, then they review that.
And when you see them again, you can
tell they review, they understand their condition better.
And when they're you're discussing the options, they're
able to make more of an informed decision.
So you mentioned that the patient provider relationship
has eroded.
When we think of rebuilding this relationship, where
do you think the industry should start?
Well, there's a lot of different things that
have, you know, changed in the last 10,
15 years.
I think a lot of, things that
health care measures now and how, you know,
health care has changed.
Physicians used to work on their own a
lot before, and now majority of the physicians
are a big portion of the physicians
are employed by hospital systems. And so they
don't necessarily
take the ownership,
or they're not given the opportunity to take
the ownership. Ship. Sometimes they're told what to
do based on, you know, metrics that somebody
else might be able to measure. Not necessarily
good,
but, you know, something that
for example, patient satisfaction surveys, depending on what,
form they use, what questions they use,
that could skew
a lot of things. Patient's expectations may change.
You know? There
a lot of times people forget that when
they go see a doctor, they're not seeing
a doctor
just so that they can be done in
15 minutes, have no wait time whatsoever. Everything
is on time. Everybody's nice to them and
answers their questions, and they're done. They're going
there because
they're in pain. They have a medical condition
that they need treated, and they want to
find the best person that can treat them.
And a lot of times, it doesn't matter
if they have to wait longer, if they
have to sit in a tight room. They
don't care if you can actually help them
get better. And so I think that's how
we're gonna try coming back is,
allowing that to be a focus, taking away
all the other noise and focusing on what's
important for the patients. What is it that
they're there for? How can they get better?
And how can we enable doctors not to
worry about other things and let them focus
on making a patient better, making,
decisions that are not based on other things,
but more medically based, you know, things that
actually have an impact on the patient's lives.
So looking ahead, if the macroeconomic
challenges that health care is facing don't change,
how do you anticipate the industry might evolve?
Do you think, care will shift more to
a consumer based service than a personal one?
And, how might that impact care groups versus
individual practices?
Yeah. I mean, health care is getting expensive.
There's no doubt about it. And how long
this is sustainable for? That's a question that,
you know, we all have to answer. And
I think there are gonna be a lot
of different models that come out of this.
People have been, you know, trying different things
as you know, a lot of,
big corporations have their own,
healthcare
versions. They have tried doing things where,
it will be a group,
treatment program where they first go on a
website to learn what to do, what their
options are. And then,
once they're failed all that, then they get
diverted to some,
center, for example, for spine
care, you know, and they're
more established and have connections with the corporation.
So, unfortunately, it may go towards it, but
I think what might end so end up
or might end up helping everybody is,
where
AI and current,
technology
might
lead us to have options where we didn't
have that before. So patients, for example, might
be able to get answers to their questions
through, you know, good,
databases that are vouched for and are, you
know, checked by their information is checked by
physicians and, medical professionals.
And then at first, they would do what
it says. For example, if you have back
pain, you try physical therapy first
and try anti inflammatories if appropriate and all
that, and it they will be guided as
a group,
by
some program that is, you know, again, designed
by physicians.
But instead of them having to see patients
1 on 1, this will be more of
a group practice.
I can see that happening, and then once
they fail and then they identify a certain
percent of people, we have whether through some
wearable technology
or some, you know,
continuity technology where they're monitoring them on a
daily basis and say, okay. You failed everything
else. Now you need a specialist.
It might triage them to that particular or
a certain specialist that can actually help them.
And by doing so, it might be able
to cut health care costs. I can see
models like that coming through. It's hard to
see where it's gonna I you know, what
exactly is going to happen down the road.
But I think, with, how expensive everything's getting,
people are gonna have to look for ways
to save money without,
hopefully,
impacting our patient outcomes in a negative way.
Well, Jamen, thank you so much for joining
us today on the show. And before I
let you go, I just wanted to ask,
do you have any final thoughts you wanna
leave our audience with? Yeah. So, I mean,
talking about what we talked about today, I
think physicians
have have usually have spent a lot of
time,
lifetime, some of for for a lot of
us, you know, training to do what they
wanna do, which is help patients.
And
sometimes all that get lost once, you know,
they start working in different, work models,
hospitals,
ASCs,
private practice, whatever whatever it may be.
And then all these other things such as
surveys that the government indirectly, you know, imposes
on them through the CMS or whatever payer
system might do,
it ends up taking them away from what
they need to focus on. And I think
sooner or later, people are gonna realize that,
you know, we don't need to waste our
time with some of these things. Yes, they're
good. We need to all take care of,
or be taken care of in a friendly,
timely way, and that's all important. But at
the end of the day, what is it
that our patients need? It's getting better,
getting their health problems taken care of. And
when we start focusing on that and not
all of the other things, I think it's
gonna,
lead to a better health care for office.
Mhmm.
Well, thank you again, Jamen, for joining us
today on the show, and I hope you
have a lovely rest of your day. You
too. Thank you.