How is technology impacting the flow of patients in hospitals? - James Burns

Sam foreign.

Hi, my name is Stuart Allsop, and this is my podcast, Crazy Wisdom, where I interview creative people about how they work with and manage the stress that is inherent in creative work. What I've realized over the past 10 years of my research is that anybody who is creating something of value that is significantly different from what has come before is considered crazy. Most of us have a fear, an ingrained fear of going crazy. So what I'm saying is grab onto that fear, realize that it's there, and just go with it. Because the problems we're going to be facing over the next 20 years require crazy people in order to solve them.

Great.

Well, welcome to the Crazy Wisdom podcast. My guest here is James Burns. He's a physician's assistant from Greensboro, N.C. and Reason where I'm interviewing him is we had this Twitter exchange about basically taking his job and making part of it remote and sounded interesting to me, so I reached out to him. So welcome to the show, James.

Yeah, great, thanks so much. Glad we had the interaction on Twitter.

Yeah. So can you describe to people as you're a physician's assistant, but you've got this other gig. Can you describe to people what you do?

Yeah. Well, so actually the job I'm working in is I'm acting as a physician assistant. That's my main thing. And what I'm doing now is working on what we call pre operative management. So I work in a hospital and any of the patients that are coming in for elective surgery, knee replacements, even cardiovascular surgery, vascular surgery, 30 to 50 people a day come through our office to get pre op ed, basically to go over their history to find out if they have risk factors, see if they're ready for surgery. Usually at least half of those folks will have some sort of red flag, something in their history that comes up that makes them possibly a surgical risk. And those come to me. And so I'll get these charts for these people, look at their history, really try to take a fine tooth comb through it and find everything that could be either contraindication or just a higher risk for surgery. And I'll try to pin down that and see if we can get that optimized prior to the procedure. Sometimes we can't. I talk to anesthesiologists and we make sure that everyone's aware of the risks. But really what I try to do is make sure people are safe to go into surgery. And beyond that, on the business side of things, my job is really to reduce the number of same day cancellations because that's kind of financial killer for a hospital, that it depends on surgery.