On a recent episode of PeerPOV: The Pulse on Medicine, Jeffrey Gladd, MD, chief medical officer at Fullscript, shared his personal journey with whole person health and how it has impacted his practice.
I ’m a trained family doctor. In the midst of burnout and poor health, I ended up recognizing the need to take better care of myself through nutrition and lifestyle. I lost 50 pounds and was able to successfully wean off medication that I was taking for panic attacks.
As I started sharing this with patients, they had a desire to know more. I left my hospital practice to start a private practice so I could focus on delivering whole person care to patients who wanted and needed it.
The definition of whole person care is using all aspects of a patient’s life physical health, mental health, emotional well being, social factors to create a comprehensive treatment plan. The essence is a paradigm shift away from how we were educated. Whole person care is putting health back into healthcare because we’re focusing on the root causes of the patient’s health concerns.
The stats on provider burnout are scary, and the first step is to take a self journey. Have some lab work done, and have it interpreted through an optimal health lens. Connect the dots on how your nutrition, stress, mindfulness, and sleep are impacting your health. Putting those pieces together takes an investment of time, but it’s imperative that clinicians take care of themselves.
If we deliver truly whole person care, we fall back in love with medicine. I don’t think there’s any better feeling than connecting with a patient and the patient being engaged. We must find scalable ways to assess patients from that lens and deliver treatment plans that allow them to take the journey.
A recent McKinsey report shows 75% of patients want their healthcare experience to be collaborative with a provider. Ideally, we start building an ecosystem that allows us to scale whole person health and keeps efficiency and balance in mind for the practitioners.
We’re not going to get more hours out of our clinicians, so we must find scalable solutions that allow them to deliver this care. We must have technology that helps providers assess and deliver evidence based, whole person care at scale, and those technologies must be integrated into EHR platforms.
I would encourage physicians not to continue business as usual. The stats show the current care paradigm is not working. Let’s all rally in this whole person focus and change healthcare together
