On/Offcall: Referrals in Healthcare Are Broken. Add Your Name to Help Fix Them
Welcome back to On/Offcall!
Sign up for our newsletter
On/Offcall is the weekly dose of information and inspiration that every physician needs.
Wow! We’re so heartened to see how many physicians from all across the country are coming together to fix referrals.
It’s 2026, and referrals are still one of the most frustrating and inefficient parts of our healthcare system. We’ve all experienced it: Delays, lost information, fragmented care, systems that don’t work for us or our patients. At Offcall, we’ve decided it’s time to tackle this problem together, and we just announced a new private referral and communication network for and by clinicians.
So far, the tool is only live in our first market of Columbus, but the outpouring of support has been incredible. Physicians everywhere are signing Dr. Graham Walker and Dr. Basil Kahwash’s open letter: “It’s Time to Fix Referrals in Healthcare.”
Their ask is simple: If you’ve felt this frustration, and if you imagine there could be a better solution for how referrals should work, then add your name today:
A huge thank you to everyone who’s signed thus far! Including: Shivam Shah, Jyoti Jain, Menelaos Demestihas, Alex Kaysin, Payel Gupta, Bijoy Mukherjee, Cyrus Attia, Akash Parekh, Justin Woods, Dana Weisshaar, Resa E Lewiss, Hillary Lin, Krishna Mannava, Prakash Barani, Min jung Kathy Chae, Deepak Sudheendra, Roger Wu, John Schumann, Bory Kea, Elena A Christofides, Kara Wada, Aaron Reinke, Jacob Coffman, Melissa Walsh, Daniel Tarditi, Kevin Volkema, Hardeep Phull, Jared Conley, and many more!!
The Pay Gap in Medicine Is Real. Dr. Pamela Buchanan Is Done Being Quiet About It
Dr. Pamela Buchanan is done staying quiet about what medicine gets wrong, and she’s this week’s guest on How I Doctor! Dr. Buchanan is an emergency physician, author, and founder of Melanated Medicine, a community built to support Black women physicians navigating a system that too often overlooks them. In this episode, she discusses the things many of us were trained not to talk about: pay, power, racism, and the mental health toll of this profession. She breaks down:
👉 Why physician pay transparency is still taboo and who that silence actually benefits
👉 The compounding pay gap facing Black women physicians
👉 How one conversation led her to raises and bonuses she didn’t know she was owed
👉 What it really means to experience racism on shift
👉 Why medicine expects us to absorb trauma without support
👉 And why community and shared knowledge is key to building a fairer, better system!
🎧 Listen to the full episode on Offcall
Access the Complete Report
✓Complete quantitative breakdown of what physicians really think about AI
✓Strategic implications for healthcare organizations and AI companies
✓Sentiment analysis of physician attitudes about AI and the future
Physician Spotlight: Dr. Stefanie Simmons
5 Questions With Dr. Stefanie Simmons, the Chief Medical Officer of the Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes' Foundation (tagged by last week’s spotlight Dr. Lara Zibners)
1. Stefanie, what would you tell a first-year resident that no one told you — but should have? Get your support systems in place! You are likely getting your first real paycheck. Make sure you are maxing out your 401k, and use some of your income to buy back some time. Hire a house cleaning service. Prep food in nice containers on your day off to ensure good nutrition. Buy some nice blackout curtains. I had two kids during residency, so even with two incomes, things were tight...but we could still do these things, and it made a HUGE difference once we started.
2. What’s the hardest part about being a physician that you think should be talked about more openly? The balance of control and responsibility. As a physician, you have a tremendous amount of responsibility and very little control. One way to think about this is through the spheres of influence. You control a small sphere in the middle, which mostly represents your thoughts and actions. A larger sphere around that is what you can influence: the performance of your team, the atmosphere of the department, and your hospital operations, for example. The largest sphere is things outside of your control that you need to accept. For physicians, we are responsible for the things we can control, must influence, and are sometimes held accountable for things outside our control, such as through malpractice litigation. Most people, physicians included, overestimate what they can control and underestimate what they can influence. We struggle to accept that some things, like patient deaths, are unavoidable. We must internalize this clearly because many outside influences don't understand our work or where we can and should make an impact.
3. What’s the thing that you love most about The Pitt and feel that it captures best about medicine? I love how the Pitt is showing the interpersonal sequelae of chronic and acute stress. It is really easy to engage with the competency (medical skill and leadership) presented in the first season. Now, in the second season, we are seeing some of the real mental health and relationship fallout from that chronic and acute stress. While watching this season with my family, my husband said, "ER people should do tours." It was an interesting idea and highlighted the need for real rest and recovery from chronic stress.
Sign up for free
Join Offcall to keep reading and access exclusive resources for and by the medical community.
Offcall Team is the official Offcall account.
Comments
(0)
Join the conversation
See what your colleagues are saying and add your opinion.