Oncologist Dr. Hardeep Phull Wants Doctors to Stop Saying “Burnout”

It’s been a huge week: I’m so grateful to all the new physicians who joined us in record numbers this week across all specialties — I see you, neurology, rheumatology, hospital medicine, gastroenterology, and emergency medicine (to name a few!). If you’re new, hi and welcome. We’re really excited you’re here.

One month ago, Offcall was just an idea. With a bold mission to combat burnout and improve the wealth and wellbeing of physicians, we set out to build a community and a set of job transparency tools to help physicians come together and access reliable data to know our worth. Seeing how quickly we’re growing gives me great faith that, despite these trying times, our best days of practicing medicine are still ahead of us.

How can you advocate for yourself if you don’t know what’s normal? That’s why salary transparency is so powerful: With each new physician who joins, we gain collective power. And as we continue to grow, we will be able to better advocate for ourselves and achieve fairer compensation across all specialities. Thank you for being part of this movement, and please keep spreading the word about Offcall in your networks. We’re just getting started.

Graham Walker, MD, Emergency Physician
Co-founder, Offcall

Dr. Hardeep Phull: Stop Saying “Burnout”

This week on How I Doctor, Graham spoke to Dr. Hardeep Phull, an oncologist who’s become a forceful advocate for physician burnout – except he believes “moral injury” is a better term for the widespread problem. Hardeep also reflects on finding purpose during COVID, his financial advice for younger doctors, and sheds light on the current landscape of oncology, including what’s exciting (targeted drugs) and what’s broken (note-taking). The episode has sparked some powerful reactions:

@Dr. Larissa May: “Keeping agency and using my voice in these difficult times is why I am still practicing medicine, even though it looks different than my early career days.”
@Aditi Joshi: “A great reminder to stop and see what’s important in life.”
@Dr. Eric Arzubi: “Sticking to our values while our boundaries are being constantly tested and pierced is unbelievably hard.”

Listen to the episode →

Most Talked About On Offcall

The Investing Strategy Smart Physicians Use to Optimize Their Wealth →

“Rebalancing” is an opportunity to right-size your portfolio. Learn which of these three approaches is right for you.

Sample Budgets to “Live Like a Resident”
Chip away at student debt. Cover daily expenses. Save for retirement. Each physician’s paycheck needs to do a lot, so how should you budget?

How to Land a Non-Clinical Job →
Dr. Phil DiGiacomo left emergency medicine three years ago. Here’s his practical advice on how to navigate the non-clinical job search.

3 Things to Read This Week

Mark Cuban: A Few Words on Healthcare (Blog Maverick)
Mark shares his “stream of consciousness thoughts” on fixing the economics of healthcare. Here’s a nice TL;DR summary from Graham.

Race and Ethnicity, Gender, & Promotion of Physicians in Academic Medicine (JAMA)
A new study found women and non-white men are more likely to go into academic medicine but less likely to be promoted.

ExThera Claimed Its Device Could Cure Cancer. But Patients Died. (NYT)
Late-stage cancer patients abstained from chemo and traveled to a small clinic in Antigua for blood-filtering treatment that cost $45,000.

Don’t Forget to Sign Up for Offcall

At Offcall, our goal is simple: to bring more fairness and transparency to medicine. If you’re new here, don’t forget to sign up for our job transparency tool!

Using our private and anonymous salary tool, thousands of physicians are benchmarking their pay and key aspects of their jobs — things like patients seen per shift, total hours worked, supervising NPs and PAs, etc. We’re gearing up for our first major data release across various specialities. If you’re curious how your compensation compares to your peers, and to ensure we have the most accurate data to help bring about pay and workload transparency, we would love for you to join us!

Sign Up (It’s anonymous and takes less than 2 minutes)

Chime in — we’re physician-sourcing

We’re trying something new: Let’s crowd-source answers to a key question and publish the responses to help fellow physicians at work and in their lives. This week’s question:

What’s one tool (AI or otherwise), app, or work hack you’ve used to make your life or job easier? How did it help you?

Reply directly to this email, or add a comment, and we’ll publish the responses next week. Have a question you think we should ask next week? Also let us know!

Highlights From Our Community

Each week, we celebrate career milestones, launches, & other goings-on in the physician community. Have something to promote? Reply and we’ll feature you.

🎙️ Congrats, Hardeep Phull
How I Doctor guest Dr. Phull also delivered the keynote lecture at the University of Arizona’s annual Undergraduate Biology Research Program conference.

🎙️Go off, Danielle Ofri
Dr. Danielle Ofri is one of four doctor-slash-writers speaking at Literary Rx, an upcoming panel discussion. Drs. Perri Klass, Damon Tweedy and Esther Choo round out the group. Get tickets.

👏🏼 Congrats, Alex Oshmyansky
Dr. Oshmyansky is the co-founder of Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, which turned three years old this week.

📚Congrats, Maxime Griot
Nature Communications featured Dr. Griot’s recent article about research on the metacognitive capabilities of LLMs for handling medical questions. Read the paper.

🎙️Congrats, Sudeep Bansal
Dr. Bansal will share insights about measuring quality in primary care at an upcoming virtual event hosted by Dr. Paulius Mui. Sign up.

🎙️Awesome job, Graham and Jonathan H. Chen
ICYMI, Graham and data scientist Jonathan Chen shared practical tips for rolling out AI in healthcare at Stanford’s Center for Biomedical Informatics Research. (Recording link coming soon).

🎓Way to go, Basil Kahwash
Dr. Kahwash earned a new certification: FAAAAI (Fellow of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology).

🙏Thanks, Justin Woods
We love a shout out 😊

🎈Career moves — cheers!
→ Dr. Minal Shah started a new role as Medical Director of Virtual Care at CommonSpirit Health Mountain Region.

→ Dr. Christian Pean is now the Executive Director for AI and Information Technology Innovation at Duke Orthopaedic Surgery.

Want to be featured next week or know about a colleague who should be? Email us directly, or let us know in the comments.

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