Vital Conversations: Influencing Workplace Well-Being in Health Care
Let’s face it — working in health care is rewarding, but it can also be very hard. The Johns Hopkins Medicine Vital Conversations podcast explores the many factors that affect workplace well-being in health care. We take on complex topics through engaging conversations with thought leaders, bringing a range of perspectives and approaches to making work better. Whether you are a health care executive, front-line manager, clinician, researcher or a patient, we invite you to be part of this well-being journey.
Meet the Hosts
OWB Leadership Team on Building a Workplace Culture that Supports Well-Being
We welcome Rich Safeer, our colleague in the Office of Well-Being. Rich leads the Healthy at Hopkins employee health and well-being strategy for Johns Hopkins Medicine (JHM). In this episode, the JHM well-being leadership team engages in conversation around culture--a key component to achieve work place well-being. The team offers example interventions that leaders and managers can use to support a culture of well-being, including defining healthy norms, peer support and the responsibility of the organization to help make the healthy choice the easy choice.
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Lee Daugherty Biddison, M.D., M.P.H.
Chief Wellness Officer
Johns Hopkins MedicineCarolyn Cumpsty Fowler, Ph.D., M.P.H., N.B.C.-H.W.C., P.C.C.
Executive Director for Nursing Well-Being
Johns Hopkins Health System -
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- Culture is defined as the shared behaviors, beliefs and attitudes of a group of people. Culture influences well-being at many levels — in the organization, in the discipline/field, in the department and on the team.
- There is no one size fits all approach for well-being in the workplace. We need to adapt our approach to account for the lived experiences and needs of different groups.
- Norms are defined as the expected and accepted behaviors of a group. To support well-being, teams can start by talking about norms and how they can support one another to create healthy behaviors and emotions.
- There are many low-cost well-being interventions, including: listening, making time for meaningful conversation, putting the healthy choice first, peer support and leadership engagement.
- Fostering employee well-being reaps benefits for the organization. When employees feel supported and cared for, they are more engaged with the mission and with one another, and more likely to stay with the organization.
“I should be able to manage this myself”: The unique challenges of getting clinicians to access mental health care
Most clinicians know that depression, anxiety and other mood disorders are treatable conditions. Unfortunately, clinicians often face barriers when accessing care for themselves. To better understand why, we welcome Dr. Karen Swartz, Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins to the podcast. Learn how depression or other mental health conditions may present in clinicians, why these may pose a challenge to care seeking, and what colleagues and health care leaders can do to make treatment more accessible.
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Carolyn Cumpsty Fowler, Ph.D., M.P.H., N.B.C.-H.W.C., P.C.C.
Executive Director for Nursing Well-Being
Johns Hopkins Health System -
Karen Swartz, M.D.
Professor of Clinical Psychiatry Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
Director of Clinical Services at Johns Hopkins Mood Disorders Center
Director of Johns Hopkins Adolescent Depression Awareness Program -
- An estimated 1/3 of clinicians are not getting preventive screenings or primary care.
- We need to make it easy for clinicians to access care. Two strategies for organizations are:
- offering confidential, high-quality mental health care on campus and at convenient hours, and
- training supervisors to recognize when someone is suffering.
- We all need time to rest, so we have the energy to do our best work and to enjoy life. Leaders and clinical supervisors should consider how they are protecting clinicians who often have long hours and take work home.
- When we notice that someone is suffering, we have an obligation to support their ability to access care. Treatment for depression and other mood disorders works.
Technology should make our work easier, not harder: The promise of new health IT to support clinician well-being
Dr. Manisha Loss, Associate Chief Medical Information Officer at Johns Hopkins Medicine, joins us to talk about promising artificial intelligence interventions happening now at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Loss shares her vision for innovations in health IT to bring us closer together, improving the provider-patient relationship. She shares what we’ve learned about digital scribes, in-basket triage and auto-draft message responses, and how these technologies can positively impact the well-being of our workforce.
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Lee Daugherty Biddison, M.D., M.P.H.
Chief Wellness Officer
Johns Hopkins Medicine -
Manisha J. Loss, M.D.
Associate Professor of Dermatology
Associate Chief Medical Information Officer
Johns Hopkins Medicine
Medical Director, Patient Access Services
Office of Johns Hopkins Physicians -
- Until recently, we have expected clinicians to simply adapt their practices to new technologies: to take classes on EHR optimization or develop work-a-rounds, which add to the burden of clinical practice. We now understand that, instead of adding to the work, we must find ways for the technology, like AI, to make work easier rather than adding to the burden.
- In its best iteration, AI has the possibility of supporting one of the most rewarding aspects of medicine- our relationship with our patients. The renewed connection with patients and their families can enhance our sense of meaning in work and promote retention.
- Because these technologies are so new, it’s important to study outcomes in different clinical settings and with different members of the clinical team. Roll outs need to be carefully planned so not to unintentionally add to the burden on our teams.
“This Is Getting in the Way of Me Providing the Best Care”: An Approach to Tackle Prior Authorization Burden in Primary Care
In this episode, Dr. Kim Peairs joins us to discuss the role of the medication access pharmacy technician, a promising approach to tackling prior authorizations in primary care being piloted at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Peairs walks us through this team-based intervention in which matching the right skill set for the job can lead to efficiencies, engagement and meaning in work for all members of the team.
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Lee Daugherty Biddison, M.D., M.P.H.
Chief Wellness Officer
Johns Hopkins Medicine -
Kimberly Peairs, M.D.
Vice Chair for Clinical Affairs, Department of Medicine, Johns Hopkins Medicine
Medical Director for Primary Care Value and Innovation in the Office of Johns Hopkins Physicians -
- We work in teams. If one person or group is exhausted and frustrated, it can affect the whole team’s ability to deliver care. As we design interventions to improve care delivery, we need to consider the whole team.
- We need to look for opportunities to share knowledge within the team. When prescribers know which medication prescriptions are most frequently denied by payers, they can choose an acceptable alternative. Working smarter can reduce the workload and frustration for all involved.
- Centralizing a service like prior authorizations can lead to economies of scale, but it also comes with risk of disconnection and depersonalization. It’s important to look for ways to retain relationships in order to foster a sense of belonging and connection within the team.
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Lightening the Load: Strategies to Reduce Cognitive Stress in Clinical Practice
Delivering health care is high stakes, but we too often don’t protect our attention and let in too many distractions. In this podcast, Dr. Liz Harry, Chief Well-Being Officer at Michigan Medicine, argues that we make things harder by enabling systems that add to our cognitive load. Dr. Harry helps us understand how cognitive load affects clinical care, gives tips on reducing our load and describes what a true cognitive break looks like.
Listen on Spotify | Listen on Apple Podcasts
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Carolyn Cumpsty Fowler, Ph.D., M.P.H., N.B.C.-H.W.C., P.C.C.
Executive Director for Nursing Well-Being
Johns Hopkins Health System -
Elizabeth Harry, M.D., S.F.H.M.
Chief Well-Being Officer
Michigan Medicine -
- Overload is associated with burnout, and our risk of overload increases as the amount of data coming at us increases.
- Organizations seeking to address burnout can look at interventions that affect extrinsic load, such as instituting standardization, reducing redundancy and ensuring that clinicians are not forced to split their attention.
- It’s important to be patient with our early career doctors, nurses and other clinicians, who are experiencing especially heavy cognitive load because they are building new mental models while gaining experience.
- Cognitive overload shows up in our work and in our home lives. Practical tips for reducing cognitive load: Standardize and set routines, protect our attention by limiting interruptions and prioritize focused attention on the things and people that matter most.
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Are You Paying Attention?:
How We Can Use Our Focus to Reduce Cognitive Load in Support of Well-Being
Has the complexity of our work in health care outpaced our brain’s ability to keep up? Dr. Liz Harry, Chief Well-Being Officer at Michigan Medicine, discusses the connection between cognitive load and burnout, and introduces the concept of the attention economy. Dr. Harry shares strategies for leveraging technology while supporting our well-being, as well as some personal tips for protecting what has become a scarce resource — our focused attention.
Listen on Spotify | Listen on Apple Podcasts
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Lee Daugherty Biddison, M.D., M.P.H.
Chief Wellness Officer
Johns Hopkins Medicine -
Elizabeth Harry, M.D., S.F.H.M.
Chief Well-Being Officer
Michigan Medicine -
- Solving for burnout at the organizational level can feel overwhelming. Let’s not go it alone. We can learn from each other within health care and also from disciplines outside of health care. We need not only an individual growth mindset, but a collective growth mindset across health care.
- We now live in an attention economy — our attention is a scarce and valuable resource. We need to be intentional about where we choose to place our focused energy.
- As we lean into the power of AI, it’s important to consider how the technology is contributing to our well-being. Is AI reducing the number of clicks, steps or human interactions needed to complete a given task? In doing so, is it freeing up cognitive bandwidth for complex medical decision-making?
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Kale and Yoga Won't Fix This: The Need for a Systems-Change Approach to Workplace Well-Being
Most of us know what it feels like when our well-being at work is compromised. But do we know how we got there? Is it just that it’s been a tough week or we didn’t have time for yoga, or is there something much deeper about working in health care at play? Today, we’ll take our first look at the things that really influence our well-being at work.
Listen on Spotify | Listen on Apple Podcasts
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Lee Daugherty Biddison, M.D., M.P.H.
Chief Wellness Officer
Johns Hopkins MedicineCarolyn Cumpsty Fowler, Ph.D., M.P.H., N.B.C.-H.W.C., P.C.C.
Executive Director for Nursing Well-Being
Johns Hopkins Health System -
- Self-care is important for well-being, but focusing on individual behaviors will never be enough to improve our well-being at work.
- Because well-being is foundational to our ability to achieve what we care about (safety, quality, professional fulfillment, etc.), we must prioritize it.
- As with anything we care about, there are few quick fixes, but we do have guidelines and an emerging evidence base to help us move forward. We need to lean into a growth mindset, pace ourselves and realize that good things take time.