Faculty Wellbeing

With support from a Fiscal Year 2024 WellMD grant and additional funding from the department, the project titled "Establishing Department-Wide Policies and Best Practices to Minimize the Impact of Work on Physician Vacation Time" aims to lessen the negative effects of work on personal relationships, which are known to contribute significantly to physician burnout. The main goal of the project is to create standardized guidelines for vacation coverage that apply to all neurology faculty, comprising over 150 members across 15 diverse divisions. Additionally, the project will develop best practices for managing emails and meetings while faculty members are on vacation. As part of our efforts to promote a culture that encourages detachment during vacation periods, we've introduced a "Life Outside Neurology" segment, where faculty members are encouraged to share vacation photos and reflect on their experiences of detachment from work.

As part of the Pediatric Physician Wellness Improvement initiative the Child Neurology division developed an Epic Inbasket Project aimed at reducing patient advice request burden on providers and improving patient safety.   Prior to our project all patient advice requests coming into Epic Inbasket were going directly from parents to physicians without any form of triage.  Review of the nature of messages being sent found 2/3 of messages were deemed to not be requiring physician level medical decision making.  Delays in responding to messages raised safety concerns and contributed to parental and staff frustration.  After in depth root cause analysis, the division was able restructure its work flows and add a layer of nursing to triage patient advice requests. This substantially reduced the number of messages sent to physicians, and eliminated those messages not requiring physician level medical decision making. This ultimately has helped improve physicians satisfaction and patient safety. This project is ongoing in efforts to continue to improve in these areas.

The Department of Neurology has initiated two pilot programs to transform our faculty’s documentation process: (1) an in-person scribe option and (2) the DAX scribe, an AI-driven, asynchronous solution. Our main goal is to determine which approach most benefits our faculty in terms of efficiency and accuracy of documentation and impact on user satisfaction. We also focus on streamlining the onboarding process for new faculty joining the DAX scribe program and improved documentation metrics. The project aims to use scribe services to streamline documentation process, enabling physicians to dedicate less time to charting and more time focusing on patient care.

The Email Reduction Task Force was convened in July 2023 as a partnership between faculty and Beth Hoyte, Communications Manager and Sydney Ng, Internal Communications Associate, in response to high email burden consistently reported by faculty. The task force quickly coalesced around a goal of a weekly departmental digest to consolidate 15-30 emails that were previously each sent individually. The task force met several times and adjourned February 2024 following the successful roll out of the weekly neurology digest.