Internal medicine physician Kenny Cole remembers struggling to meet the needs of older patients in appointment time slots designed for simpler, straightforward cases.
“An 18-year-old with a sore throat would have a 15-minute clinic visit on my schedule, and so would an 80-year-old taking a dozen medications, with a dozen medical problems and a dozen complaints,” says Cole, a former clinician at the Baton Rouge Clinic and now vice president of clinical improvement at Ochsner Health. “That’s crazy, right?”
While he loved seeing patients—and still keeps clinic hours one day a week—a 4,000-patient load contributed to Cole’s burnout from private practice. Passionate about improving health care, he transitioned to health care strategy. One issue he mulls is how to integrate the needs of older patients into a system ill-equipped to handle their complexities.
Aging individuals are the fastest-growing demographic in Louisiana, comprising almost 20% of the state’s population, according to the Louisiana Department of Health.
Statistics signal an ominous future. The surge in older patients is placing more pressure on national and regional health care systems already facing significant primary care labor shortages, capacity constraints and Medicare reimbursements that do not cover the full cost of care.
“First and foremost, we need to strengthen and save primary care,” says Cole, who is also the medical director of digital medicine programs at Ochsner. Cole is examining how tools like AI can simplify the workloads of overtaxed physicians.
“One of the things we’re doing is examining how to leverage technology to reshape how primary care is delivered,” he says.
The primary care shortage is real, with fewer medical school students gravitating to primary care, considered on the lower end of the pay scale, and opting for more lucrative specialties instead, says Susan Nelson, former system chair for palliative medicine at Ochsner Health.
Compounding the problem is that even students who want to go into primary care don’t want to work the kind of hours that their predecessors did, Nelson adds.
“There’s one statistic out there that suggests for every physician who retires, we will need 1.7 new doctors,” Nelson says. “The whole work-life balance thing is a big disparity. Gen Z is just not willing to put in those hours.”
Read the full story, and check out the full Trends in Health Care package from this month’s Business Report. Send comments to editor@businessreport.com.
