On/Offcall: It's Not Doctor Burnout. It's Moral Injury, with Dr. Wendy Dean

Welcome Back to On/Offcall!

Don’t miss Session #3 of Offcall’s AI Residency live webinar series! Hosted by Dr. Graham Walker and AI educator Dr. Michael Hobbs, this time we’ll be showing you how to actually build real clinical tools, live (!), with no coding background required. We’ll be showcasing two special guests EuDoc Direct Primary Care physician Dr. Kenneth Qiu and Heidi's Shreyank Kadadi, and during the event, we will also be featuring various clinicians who have vibe coded their own tools in a matter of minutes!

If you’d like to be featured, be sure to reply directly with a quick description of your project and what you’ve used it for, or you can also tag yourself in the comments!

Join June 10th. 5PM PT / 8PM ET.

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RSVP to Abridge’s First Ever Keynote!

ICYMI, Abridge will be hosting its first-ever Keynote on June 11, live from New York City, and they’ve invited the Offcall community to stream the session live! Abridge was built to remove the barriers between clinicians and their patients. Livestream this Keynote presentation to be the first to learn about the most significant step toward that goal to date. It's all coming together.

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Moral Injury Is Why The Best Doctors Are Disappearing with Dr. Wendy Dean

This week, we were proud to invite Dr. Wendy Dean to How I Doctor! 👏 Dr. Dean, host of 43cc Podcast and founder of Moral Injury of Healthcare, coined the term “moral injury” in medicine as a way to acknowledge what physicians face on a daily basis. She joins Graham for one of the most important conversations we’ve had yet about the future of medicine, physician agency, and what happens when the profession starts to feel unrecognizable.

Dr. Dean is thoughtful, candid, and unafraid to say what many physicians already know but rarely hear acknowledged out loud: Burnout is not the diagnosis. The system is.

They dive into:

✨ Why “burnout” mislabels the real source of physician distress

✨ How moral injury happens when physicians are repeatedly forced to violate their own values

✨ How younger physicians are “melting away” from medicine instead of leaving outright

✨ The overlooked risk of losing human connection between physicians and patients

✨ And so much more!

Listen to the episode now (and connect further with Wendy here!)

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Physician Spotlight: Dr. Trisha Roy

3 questions with Houston Methodist vascular surgeon Dr. Trisha Roy (nominated by Dr. Anahita Dua!)

1. Trisha, what’s the hardest part about being a physician that you think should be talked about more openly? Medicine isn’t always curative. Limb preservation is a palliative specialty in many ways. You can do a technically successful procedure, and the patient may still ultimately lose their limb if their disease is too advanced. The emotional tension of balancing hope, realism, and responsibility can feel heavy and sometimes heart breaking. But that heartbreak also fuels my passion for research and innovation. It’s a constant reminder that we need better ways to understand disease and personalize treatments to make our interventions more durable and successful in the future.

2. Forget pizza parties — what’s one way you’ve coped with burnout that’s actually made a difference? Having a creative outlet. For me, that’s journaling, scrapbooking, photos, and intentionally celebrating the small victories that otherwise get lost in the chaos of clinical practice. In vascular surgery, and limb preservation in particular, you deal with a lot of failure – disease progression, failed procedures, systems issues, and patients that are too far gone by the time they reach you. If you focus too much on the losses, you can miss the fact that you are helping someone keep their independence, avoid amputation, or simply relieving their pain can matter enormously, even if it is temporary. I’m very intentional about celebrating the small victories along the way and it helps to keep things in perspective.

3. What is something you are currently working on that you hope will have a big impact on the practice of medicine? I’m working on advanced vascular imaging using MRI to better characterize individual patients’ blood vessels before intervention. Right now, many treatment decisions in peripheral arterial disease are still based primarily on how narrowed a vessel looks on angiography. But two blockages that look identical on an angiogram can behave completely differently during treatment because the underlying vessel biology and vessel composition are different.

The goal is to move toward more personalized treatment selection – understanding which lesions are likely to respond to endovascular therapy, which patients may do better with surgery, and how devices interact with specific vessel characteristics for more successful interventions in the future.

4. Who do you want to nominate next to get the next Physician Spotlight?? Dr. Laura Drudi, a vascular surgeon-scientist who has done incredible work on burnout and physician wellness while also building an impressive academic and research career. Her thoughtful insights really resonate with the next generation of physicians.

2025 PHYSICIANS AI REPORT

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From Our Partners: Grow Your Practice. Grow Your Network. Earn CME Along the Way.

A strong referral network only works if your practice is built on a clear, intentional foundation. In this AMA led by Lucens Founder Dr. Eric Mann, you'll hear practical advice on evaluating new service lines, testing demand, and protecting your mission while you grow.

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If you're a Lucens Plus member, you'll also get complimentary access to Learner+, a clinician-centered platform that rewards CME/CE credits for Reflective Practice, which you can earn by attending this AMA.

Best of Medicine

More Indirect Patient Care Activities Per Visit (Annals of Family Medicine)

From François Gallant, Mathew Grandy, Rebecca H. Correia, Erin Palmer, Joshua Tracey, Sarah Sabri, Julie Easley, Lindsay Hedden and M. Ruth Lavergne: Based on an 11-Year Analysis of family physician EHR records in Canada, between 2011 and 2021, lab tests rose 68.5%, referrals jumped 80.2%, and prescriptions climbed 43.1%.

Perspectives on Attrition Among Emergency Physicians (JAMA Network)
From Michelle Lin, Senera Hua, Sally Mahmoud-Werthmann, Abigail Tapper, Roma Nawy, Cindy Phan, RICHELLE COOPER, Chris Bennett, Michelle Lall, Pooja Agrawal, Kinjal Sethuraman, Moon Lee and more: Why do emergency physicians stop practicing and what strategies support retention?

What AI Can't Do: The Case for Trust as a Clinical Strategy (Ameya Kulkarni)
“As AI reshapes medicine, I keep coming back to the same question: what’s left that is irreducibly human?”

Community Highlights

Great work, Vivek Chander
Dr. Vivek Chander announced the National Alliance of Virtual Physicians, a physician-led policy advocacy organization to ensure physicians who practice virtual medicine are the ones who shape the systems that govern it. Learn more here. Featuring an amazing group of physicians including: Dan Montville, Alex Mohseni, Tammy Fouse, Tom Gill, Karen Jackson, Jennifer Peña, Liza Ryan Gill, Mike Woo-Ming, Rachel Quinn, Kudzai Dombo.

Give it a listen, David Lortscher
Dr. David Lortscher appeared on the Skin Angels podcast with Dr. Peter Lio to discuss why physicians on founding teams of startups succeed at a dramatically higher rate (51 of the 100 largest healthcare companies built in the last 40 years had a physician founder!). Give it a listen here.

Exciting new role, Lin Zhao
Dr. Lin Zhao has joined HonorHealth as Medical Director of Clinical Informatics – Population Health. Congratulate her here.

Congrats, Kavita Babu
Dr. Kavita Babu announced she is joining Heywood Healthcare as Chief Medical Officer and VP of Medical Affairs. Congratulate her here.

Also congrats, Andre Kumar
Dr. Andre Kumar has been promoted to Clinical Professor in the Stanford Department of Medicine! Congratulate him here.

Exciting new chapter, James Barry
After 26 years at the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine, James Barry announced that he is beginning a new role as Chief Clinical Quality and Transformation Officer for Pediatrix Medical Group. Learn more here.

Let’s goo, Dhuru Patel
Dr. Dhuru Patel announced he officially received his MD from UNC School of Medicine and will be starting his Internal Medicine residency at Temple Health in Philadelphia. Celebrate him here.