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Show Notes
Dr. Josh Emdur is not your average physician. With his expertise and passion for improving the efficiency in the delivery of primary care, he has become a pioneer in the field. He spent over a decade treating the sick within the hospital walls. It was during this time that he came to a profound realization: true health is achieved outside of the hospital, and he made it his mission to transform the way primary care is provided.
He is currently the Chief Medical Officer at SteadyMD, where he launched the world’s first virtual primary care practice specifically tailored for runners. Leveraging technology and focusing on preventive measures, he has bridged the gap between healthcare and wellness.
In this episode, you will hear:
- The key differences between hospital care and primary care.
- How we all are paying for the current ER system in US Health Care.
- Why asynchronous care can be great for both patients and providers.
- Removing barriers to medical care.
- The changing landscape of medical care in part because of telehealth.
- How telehealth is changing the landscape for both patients and physicians.
- Building a virtual practice designed to cater to a certain group of people.
Josh Emdur is a 50-state-licensed physician leader with a passion for improving the efficiency in the delivery of primary care. He believes everyone should have access to healthcare that is convenient, affordable, and high value.
He spent over a decade treating the sick in the hospital prior to becoming the Chief Medical Officer at SteadyMD, where he launched the world’s first virtual primary care practice, especially for runners. While caring for hospitalized patients, he learned that health is achieved outside of the hospital.
Connect with Dr. Josh Edmur:
Website: https://www.steadymd.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-emdur-do-80b4867/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drjoshruns/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/steadymdrunning
Connect with R Blank and Stephanie Warner: For more Healthier Tech Podcast episodes and to download our Healthier Tech Quick Start Guide, visit https://www.healthiertech.co and follow https://instagram.com/healthiertech
Additional Links:
- Shield Your Body website: https://ShieldYourBody.com
- Shield Your Body Youtube Channel: https://youtube.com/shieldyourbody
- Host R Blank on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rblank9/
- Shield Your Body on Instagram: https://instagram.com/shieldyourbody
Transcript
Dr. Josh Emdur 0:00
We all live in an age of convenience. I mean, we can hop on our phone and request an Uber, we can request any kind of food we want delivered to our house, you can get pretty much any kind of service. And I think a big challenge that we’re seeing now with with digital health is consumers expect that same level that they get from these other end the same level of service from these other industries. When the reality is we still have a clinician shortage, there’s a shortage of doctors, nurse practitioners, healers out there. So now we’re at this place of like, how do we make it work all around. So again, patients get the care that they need at the right time at the right place for the right cause.
Announcer 0:49
Welcome to the healthier tech podcast, the show about building a healthier relationship with modern technology. Now, here are your hosts, R blank and Stephanie Warner.
R Blank 1:02
So Steph, have you made use of telehealth in the past few years?
Stephanie Warner 1:07
I absolutely have. I’m a huge fan of telehealth, and you’re gonna hear that coming through a little bit in this next interview. And I’m a huge advocate huge fan. I think there’s I think it’s a critical aspect to providing more access and efficient health care. And I can’t wait to see you know what the future holds for it.
R Blank 1:29
Yeah, well, so our next guest in today’s episode, he agrees and that’s Dr. Josh, Admiral. I’ll introduce him in a second. I’ll just say before we get into the episode, not only was it a great interview, he brought up because we’ve talked about telehealth before, and I’m sure we’ll talk about it again. But he really brought a perspective about what this means for the physician as well as for the patient. And it was really eye opening to me, especially as we’ve covered issues like physician burnout and rates of suicide and suicidal ideation and in this industry. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, well, let’s get into it.
Stephanie Warner 2:09
Let’s do that.
R Blank 2:14
Dr. Josh mTOR is not your average physician. With his expertise and passion for improving the efficiency in the delivery of primary care. He has become a pioneer in the field. As a 50 state licenced physician leader, he firmly believes that everyone should have access to health care that is not only convenient and affordable, but also delivers high value. He spent over a decade treating the sick within the hospital walls. It was during this time that he came to a profound realisation. True Health is achieved outside of the hospital, and he made it his mission to transform the way primary care is provided. He’s currently the Chief Medical Officer at steady MD, we launched the world’s first virtual primary care practice specifically tailored for runners, leveraging technology and focusing on preventative Messrs. He has bridged the gap between health care and wellness. Welcome, Dr. Ender to the healthier tech podcast.
Dr. Josh Emdur 3:09
Hey, thanks for having me really excited. You are really excited to talk about this topic that’s so near and dear to my heart.
R Blank 3:16
Ya know, there’s there’s a lot here that I find interesting that I want to get into as I was prepping for the episode, actually, we’ll, we’ll start right actually, with one of the the first questions that kind of popped in my head, which is, what is hospital care? And what is primary care? And what are the key differences?
Dr. Josh Emdur 3:35
Yeah, no, great question. So when I worked in the hospital, I, I really loved every minute of it. And that I was, I was there to be able to use my expertise and my skills to take care of people when they were in some of the hardest times of their life showing up after their first heart attack or complication of diabetes. So possible medicine is really akin to I used to call myself a firefighter kind of mentality where it was the emergency rooms, job to stabilise a patient kind of come up with a working diagnosis and then from there in hospital medicine, my job was to take that handoff from the emergency room and get the patient better and then back to their lives and back to the care of their primary care doctor to keep them healthy and out of the hospital. The second part of that question, what is primary care I mean in my mind primary care is really should be the first place you go for care not the emergency room, not the urgent care but really to that trusted medical professional that you know and knows you to keep you healthy and and out of the medical system for as long as you can.
R Blank 4:55
So hospital cares about getting you out of the hospital and primary cares about keeping you out The hospital.
Dr. Josh Emdur 5:00
I mean, I would say hospital cares about saving your life and making sure that you can, and, you know, treating you when you’re in crisis, but definitely not a place to go for primary care, you know, yeah. What, what, what, what I thought was always so trying was that I saw that this lack of access that people had where they didn’t have that primary care doctor to go to first. And instead, they would end up in the hospital for a problem that was preventable if they would have just addressed it with if they would have just addressed it earlier.
R Blank 5:41
Yeah, so that gets to a I mean, I’m clearly not an expert on this. But I have heard of increased rates of people utilising, I don’t know if it’s hospital care as much as specifically emergency room care, as their primary source of health care, because they don’t have insurance and emergency rooms are obligated to take you in by law. Is that am I right about that?
Dr. Josh Emdur 6:06
Yeah, you’ve done your homework. So make sure that the emergency room sees everyone who’s in the waiting room, no matter of what their payer is, no matter what their ethnicity is, whatever their beliefs are, they have to see everyone. And I’m really glad that those laws are in place. But the flip side of that is, I see patients every day on digital health platforms, where I hear of where my patients will tell me like, hey, the last time I got my medication for depression failed, was at the emergency room because I didn’t have any place to go. And when we look at a societal level, that’s just such a major problem, because it’s making it so our emergency rooms aren’t as able to care for the patients who really do need that level of service. And
R Blank 7:00
then who ends up like this might be too complicated to answer and just one answer, but who, who ends up paying for those bills? Those emergencies? We all do? Through what magazine through American society, society taxes or through insurance premiums are kind of a mixer. Oh, yeah, all
Dr. Josh Emdur 7:17
of those things. Okay, state funding premiums. And at the end of the day, like it’s it’s the current system is there’s lots of data out there to show it that while what’s going on in us, healthcare is great, where we’re people do have access to state of the art procedures and care. The way that it’s being delivered just isn’t efficient. And there’s lots of data out there showing that while we spend the most money in health care, we don’t have the healthiest population to show for it.
Stephanie Warner 7:57
Yeah, that’s that I definitely feel that to be it seems true on the on the ground level of, you know, being somebody who, you know, sometimes needs to go see see a health care provider, and so it can be very confusing, and not the most supportive. It seems a little frustrating, we’ll say. So I wanted to ask, can you tell us more about your journey, and the pivotal moment that led you to shift your focus from hospital based care to revolutionising primary care? And before I stop, I have to say, I’m a huge fan of the shift to telecare. I think it’s just, it’s an amazing way to to provide certain levels of health care. So yeah,
Dr. Josh Emdur 8:42
yeah. So like I was saying before, I loved my work in the hospital. But I, the part after doing it for a decade, the part that I started to lose purpose. And as that I didn’t have that continuity, like I really felt like I was just there for the emergency, but wasn’t really able to be a larger part of the solution to keeping people healthy. So with that, in 2017, two entrepreneurs reached out to me when they were looking for a primary care doctor who runs marathons to start a primary care practice that was completely online to take care of patients with similar interest to me all across the country. And I was like, Sign me up. This sounds awesome. So that was with this company called steady MD, which I’ve been with now for six years, and I’m now the Chief Medical Officer at steady MD. And I quickly realised like with that concept of linking patients with a doctor with similar interests and having using technology to communicate with that panel of patients was a way to keep people healthy using a system that’s that was a lot different than what we’re all used to have a having to call your primary care doctor make an appointment. Wait, you know, however long the wait is to see that provider to get in, like I realised that just to get a referral, yeah, right, I realised that this was a way to, to change that system. And I’ve just learned, I learned so much in that first couple years at City MD That was from 2017 to 2020, which was like the first part of study MD where we provided this, this service of connecting patients and doctors with similar interests.
R Blank 10:36
So I heard you in fact, this, everything you’re saying sounds really compelling. I heard you in a separate interview, speaking about how there’s direct primary care is that the correct phrase is outside of insurance. So I can see how avoiding insurance requirements is great, because insurance companies are notoriously difficult to deal with, even even when they actually cover you. But how does this actually work is is the platform all out of pocket, or what is the operative on the financial so with
Dr. Josh Emdur 11:14
direct primary care, essentially, you’re able to cut out the middleman and have a direct financial relationship with your clinician, okay, and study, we still operate as a similar practice, it’s now under the brand lemonaid health where patients sign up, it’s like a gym, you pay a monthly fee to have access to a doctor that you know and trust. That first visit is a video visit where you spend like an hour or so just get to know one another. And then from there, we have a chat app, so you can text message with your doctor. And you’re exactly right. And that it’s this type of like, asynchronous and text message based care for the most part isn’t covered by insurances, but it is we’re finding that people love it, both our doctors and, and our patients, because it just makes it a lot simpler to get patients the care that they need at the right time and at the right place, and also for the right costs. So like with that, you know, digital health and telemedicine like by no means is it like a panacea or solution for everything. But it’s definitely a great first stop of like Dr. Ender, like what do you think of this rash? And I can just say, hey, send me a picture of it. And then I can text back? How long have you had this rash for? Oh, I don’t really know, maybe like a month. And this is a true story where I looked at this rash. And I was like, you know, that doesn’t really look like a rash. To me that looks like a melanoma, which is slightly trending skin cancer. And that’s what it was. And I was able to get that patient to a dermatologist have a biopsy immediately. And then those slides went to the pathologist, those went to a tumour board, and then that went to a tertiary care centre, where the patient ended up having a, you know, widespread excision with lymph node biopsy, and fortunately had a great outcome. But a lot of us don’t like of going in to see the doctor, a lot of us don’t have time. There’s a lot of barriers to care. So
R Blank 13:25
following that referral, I can to figure out so following that, following that referral, the rest of that patient’s journey was through normal channels, what they used steady MD for was the initial evaluation, and then the referral. Is that Yeah, you got okay.
Dr. Josh Emdur 13:42
And this is where it’s like, I think everyone needs access to some form of professional medical guidance, like, yeah, so easy for any of us, myself included, have like, you know, just going to Google and saying, like, I have this problem with,
R Blank 13:56
oh, everything is cancer, what
Dr. Josh Emdur 13:57
does the internet right, my patients now are so educated, they’ll show up to visit with me knowing more about a condition than I do. And that’s okay, I’ve accepted that. I mean, I know where to go to get, you know, get information that is more clinically validated than what Google will show up. But my patients will come in to me with really compelling evidence of what they think they have, and I’ll listen to that and make sure that, you know, we are right, and we’re not kind of, you know, barking up the wrong tree, if you will, but everyone has access to so much information now, but then it’s like, well, what do we do with it? What are the great, what are the great next steps?
Stephanie Warner 14:39
Right, right. I so I have a quite a bit of experience on the patient side using telehealth and I just I absolutely love it. It removes barriers for me. So it was, you know, I went into urgent care, and it was during COVID time like the big part of COVID time and before vaccines and And it was a, it was, you know, getting in the door was difficult. And then I was told the expense of it. And I had already looked into the tele the telehealth option and it was a, it was a quarter of the price. So just walking through the doors gonna call me cost me four times as much. So I, of course went to I was like, Okay, well let me just go do the telehealth and see what what I can gain from that. And they were able to, to give me the insight they needed to give me the prescriptions I needed, all for, you know, a fraction of the cost. And I got to be home. I didn’t have to wait. I didn’t have to expose myself to anything. And it was it was wonderful. And from there, I became quite a huge fan of the concept of telehealth. And my my question is so it. So during COVID, it seems like there was a huge rise in the acceptance and use of telehealth. And now now that we’re kind of over that hump, and people are going back into, you know, their primary care going into offices, are you seeing a big impact in the adoption rate, I guess of telehealth by other the facilities that do adopt it and provide it for their for their patients?
Dr. Josh Emdur 16:17
Yeah, great question. So, going back to 2017, when I let my hospital group know that I was not going to renew my contract, pursue a career in digital health and telemedicine. At that time, my colleagues were like, Josh, like, that’s crazy. Like, why would you leave, you know, this great job to be an internet doctor. I even got a comment that will always stick with me. Like, it must be nice that your wife’s a surgeon, which she is, but it was like, my colleagues just thought like I was just going out and doing like something that wasn’t really, you know, that they didn’t believe in that wasn’t going to make a difference. Fast forward to 2021. Like that same person who I consider a friend and I don’t think they meant those comments to really be hurtful. And they’ve pretty tough aid in her paper. Going back to 2021, like, you know, I would get comments, I got a comment from that same person saying, Well, hey, Josh, like you kind of got lucky. They’re like, good work with the telemedicine and it’s because with the pandemic, all of my colleagues experience what you would, how valuable of a tool it is. Going back to 2017. Again, you know, the comments I would get was, well, how are you going to do an exam? And my my response was, like, you know, there’s certain things I won’t be able to examine, but will that actually change my medical decision making? And there’s still times where I asked where I asked myself that same question of like, you know, is this something that I can safely evaluate, diagnose and treat by a digital health or telehealth modality? And sometimes that answer is no, like, we need to actually get you in or someone can take a closer look at that lay their hands on your belly to make sure you don’t have any signs of an acute abdominal process that’s going on. But really to answer the question, I think our clinicians have seen the benefits of telehealth, I think our patients have have done so as well. So now we’re at this point of figuring out how it becomes the new normal, like how do we integrate it to make the whole healthcare system work better for everyone. It is true that the number of visits has gone down from the number of telemedicine visits have gone down from the COVID peak. But the future is bright for telehealth, telehealth. And I think we’re close to a point where the word telehealth is going to go away because it’s just going to be an expected part of the system. We all live in an age of convenience. I mean, we can hop on our phone and request an Uber we can request any kind of food we want delivered to our house, you can get pretty much any kind of service. And I think a big challenge that we’re seeing now with with digital health is consumers expect that same level that they get from these other end the same level of service from these other industries. When the reality is we still have a clinician shortage. There’s a shortage of doctors, nurse practitioners, healers out there. So now we’re at this place of like how do we make it work all around. So again, patients get the care that they need at the right time at the right place for the right cost,
Stephanie Warner 19:58
right and that kind of goes into my next call question which is how does or how have you found the rise of this telehealth has affected physicians and their your kind of daily day to day life? It how has it affected your ability to practice and practice more efficiently or effectively? And the other side of that is is your well being as a physician?
Dr. Josh Emdur 20:23
Yeah, no. So, going back, I finished medical school in 2004 residency in 2007. Up until 2017, I never would have thought I would have an opportunity to practice anywhere with a internet connection. So that was like mind blowing to me. And not all specialties can can utilise telemedicine as much as I can. Now as a primary care doctor, like some specialties are more surgical or require a lot more detailed physical exam than the technology currently provides. So that was a huge, like now that primary care doctor and get licenced in multiple states, because I still need to be licenced in every state where I started a doctor patient relationship. Now that I can work remotely, it really completely changes that job. A lot of my colleagues are able to work schedules that they were never able to work before in the clinic, where they can choose to work weekends or evenings and have more time for their kids more time for their pastimes, to just make it so they can still practice their craft their profession of being a doctor, or a health care provider. But be able to do it outside of, you know, clinic walls or hospital walls is is very different. And in order to, to, like prevent burnout. I think that there there’s two, two sides to that coin, like for me, who’s someone who is kind of always very, like more prone to like workaholic tendencies. For me, it’s been harder to find that balance because there’s almost always work to do. So, with anything, like the key is to find that right balance where you’re, you feel like your work is meaningful, you’re making a difference, but you’re also having enough time for yourself to recharge and feel, you know, you’re living the life that you want to live.
R Blank 23:01
Yeah, so I appreciate you bringing the conversation there. Because what we’ve done in this interview and what a lot of people do when they talk about telehealth is talk about it from the advantages of from the patient perspective, but I feel like what you were just getting at were some of the improvements that this can bring to the physician experience of the delivery of, of healthcare we recently had on there’s a the episode hasn’t aired yet. But Dr. Sapna Shah Hawk who has a podcast the worthy physician, and in that one, we talked a lot about not just physician burnout, but increased rates of severe depression and, and unfortunately, suicide among the medical community. Can you touch a little bit more on what you just started talking about, which is what this method of delivery of health care can mean to quality of life for physicians, because a that matters to physicians, but B that also matters to patients, because when physicians are, are in a better place, the whole experience is going to be better for everybody.
Dr. Josh Emdur 24:12
Yeah, I love that. I mean, I think happy doctors in a good place will be will make for happier patients like and any human human interaction. If one side of that interaction is down and doesn’t have good energy, it’s really hard to have a healing relationship. But to answer your question, you know, there’s a tonne of opportunity out there to use digital health in a way that up say office based, family practice doc or office base internists use digital health to take care of things that can be managed in so seconds to minutes. And then use that time gaining to then be able to have that time for the patient that does really need to be seen in person. I’ve, I’ve also done quite a bit of clinic work. And there’s no doubt that we need to be able to support our, our colleagues in the clinics and in the hospitals. And that’s where telemedicine can help make the whole ecosystem work more efficiently and effectively for patients.
R Blank 25:34
So we kind of skipped over this part earlier, you talked about how part of the incentive for you to join study MD was the opportunity to build a programme specifically for runners. So I understand that you are a sub elite marathoner.
Dr. Josh Emdur 25:51
I don’t know if I’d go that far. But oh, that’s
R Blank 25:54
biassing. So I run a couple of
Dr. Josh Emdur 25:57
marathons a year and I’d say my competitive in my, in my age group. I think maybe some elite would be if, if study and beat and it gets so busy, where I had more time to train. The past couple years, it’s about making sure that I’m spending enough time keeping in shape I just ran a 10k in Boulder on Memorial Day, one of my favourite days in Boulder the year, year or any runners out there, the the boulder Boulder, such a great 10k But um, you know, with with studying the it’s been super fun journey, I mean, starting out with the in this direct to consumer world. With COVID, we, we did a bit of a pivot where we went from going to the consumers to being a company that powers telemedicine for other large companies. Okay. And going back to the burnout question, what we’re doing, it’s anybody to help prevent burnout is, we are doing a lot of different things to keep the work varied. So it’s not just the same thing day in and day out. Which I found really, that’s another great aspect of digital health that I don’t think gets enough airtime of like, being able to, you know, from, from, from a work at home environment or remote work environment, you know, you can do some urgent care, you can do some you can do other items of care, that are just kind of different than what you’d be doing if you were going to a clinic, work and then the nine to five every day mix of urgent care, primary care, remote monitoring, chat based visits, all kinds of opportunities out there.
R Blank 27:50
That’s really Yeah, that’s part of what motivates has motivated me about I mean, it’s not directly comparable, but what motivates me about entrepreneurship is the tasks that you have from day to day or week to week are constantly shifting. And I think that’s a big part of what suppresses burnout and other other other stressors that then introduced the potential for burnout. But But what I was actually going to get to with the marathon requestion is, I would think that runners because you talked about, you know, certain types of patients, there’s there’s a lot of things where you can diagnose them remotely, but there’s certain subset where you’d have difficulty in the require in person. And I would think that with runners a lot of the issues would be more again, no experience in this but more orthopaedic in nature and thus would would require that how did you go that gets so the question is how did you go about building a virtual practice designed to cater to a specific type of athlete
Dr. Josh Emdur 28:54
Yeah, you know, what we learned was having that common interest was a really great way to just build rapport and trust just being able to speak the same language and you’re exactly right and that you know, a lot of running related injuries are musculus musculoskeletal problems. But once you know, like, who you’re talking to, like with my runners, they would have a lot of my patients would come to me saying, Hey, I saw my primary care doctor, they told me to never run again, it’s bad for your knees. And we all know that’s baloney. And you can definitely run again but let’s figure out what’s going on with your shins. How many miles per week are you running? How often have you changed your shoes
Stephanie Warner 29:40
is running?
Dr. Josh Emdur 29:42
Yeah, how are you running? Like send me a video of have your friends send a clip of you running using these three different views, all things that are utilised and most of the time it was probably overuse where they just needed some coaching of reducing their miles may change Even shoes might be changing their stride. And, you know, if those things don’t work, it’s very easy to just send for an MRI to make sure there isn’t a stress fracture or stress reaction that needs further attention.
Stephanie Warner 30:14
Yeah, I love I think that’s when, when it was first mentioned that you, you had this practice, specifically around running, I was like, Oh, that’s so genius, because it’s so effective and helpful for your patients. Because you’re gonna know what some of these issues are about, you’re going to understand that, you know, your knee is doing this, because of this. And like you were, the example you gave, I think is really powerful. The primary is just gonna say, oh, running like that has a shelf life. You know, where it’s like, well, actually, let’s just modify, you know, and you were the person who would know that were primary who doesn’t isn’t an avid runner wouldn’t know that. So I thought that was brilliant. And I kind of want to pivot a little bit. This is this this we’re, we’ve been bringing this sort of question into a lot of our interviews these days, because it’s such a hot, hot topic. How do you view AI impacting a work of study MD? Over the next, you know, one year, I’d say five years, but the way AI is moving? I’ll say, one to two years, three years?
Dr. Josh Emdur 31:18
Yeah. Love the question. The there’s no doubt AI is going to change all of our lives. For people who are like, Oh, that’s just a fad, that’s never going to work using this like really hard, definite language, like they’re going to be proven wrong very quickly. I view this as, you know, a really interesting time in the history of our species, of seeing how we make it work for the good. I share hope at setting that you were able to harness AI in a way that’s very safe and responsible to, you know, make, make health care more accessible to everyone. Like I said earlier about this clinician shortage, you know, if we can use technology smarter, to scale our clinicians to make sure that people are able to get the care that they need. I mean, I’m all for it. So I certainly hope that we’re able to figure out a way to say, to make it happen. But healthcare is, you know, the, it’s probably the most highly regulated industry in the country. So making sure that it’s done in ways that meet all the regulations, and again, are safe and always put the patient first.
Stephanie Warner 32:47
Yeah, absolutely. And I feel terrible. I’m not going to remember the name of the person we interviewed recently, somebody who’s using AI, they’re their businesses is around AI and healthcare. And I went into that interview, like, ooh, that’s me suspect that’s a little little dubious on that. And as he was talking, I was just it just blew my mind open on three possibilities for using AI in healthcare. And one of the things that really made me open my eyes was the ability to communicate and take notes and provide even that level of transparency between the communication with said in the office, what and being able to take that into your mind notes or whatever your your medical history, your medical files, and then having that and it’s not something that you have to write, just even that small level of utilisation of AI would have such a big impact on the day to the view, the transparency of communication and the effectiveness of the communication between physicians and the impatience and greater like the holistic view of your medical history. So I thought that was really interesting. But yeah, do you guys have any? Sorry, go ahead.
R Blank 34:06
Oh, no, I was just gonna say that that episode is with Dr. Harvey Castro. And that’ll be out by the time this episode is released in Bangkok. Sorry. Just just so the listeners have the reference point.
Stephanie Warner 34:17
What I was thinking is it sounds like there’s a lot of potential for AI in medicine. And I guess the question would be, are you guys are you planning on kind of looking at some of the opportunities with AI?
Dr. Josh Emdur 34:31
Absolutely. I mean, every every day, I mean, I think part of my job as the chief medical officer and as a digital health company, is just reading Twitter every day just so really trying to stay on top of what all the technophiles out there. There’s yeah, there’s historically in medicine, technology has been used for a couple of things. One As you know that technology and, and surgery and bring medications to the market, but really in the care delivery space, really looking at the electronic health record and the EMR, which was a product of early 2000s, none of that technology was really designed to make physicians lives easier, better. They’re really tools designed for charge capture to make it work for Medicare and for payers to come up with ways to figure out how to pay for medical care. But it was never really designed as a way to save physician or clinician time. And I think that’s going to be this next phase of, of technology and, and health care of, how do we make this all work so everyone can have access to healthcare, so we can make it so our healthcare spent as a nation isn’t the majority of our of our GNP? Yeah, because answer to like what you guys said earlier, I mean, we’re all paying for this, or our country is paying, paying paying for this, these exorbitant health care costs, which really makes us less competitive as a country on the world market.
Stephanie Warner 36:23
Yeah, but and if we’re going to make the spend, which is not if I think health care is a great place to to spend a tremendous amount of money, but we should be healthier. And if we’re not healthier than then we definitely are doing it wrong.
Dr. Josh Emdur 36:41
Only, like using technology to make it. So to decrease costs, and make it so our healthcare spend isn’t like 20% of our gross domestic product, I think is a real opportunity for for winning.
Stephanie Warner 37:01
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
R Blank 37:03
So Dr. Edward, this has been a really well, it’s been a really interesting conversation, I didn’t quite realise even before it started, the focus we would have on aspects like Physician Quality of Life, and, and, and clinician burnout. So this conversation has been great. And also when places I didn’t think it was going to in advance, where is it that you would like our listeners to connect with you, or study MD?
Dr. Josh Emdur 37:30
Yeah, so feel free to visit us at steady md.com. And find me on social media, and it gets Dr. Josh runs on Instagram and Twitter. And I’m always happy to talk about burnout and how we can make healthcare more accessible to everyone. So thanks for having me on. I really enjoyed the conversation.
R Blank 37:51
No, that’s great. And we’ll have all those links in the show notes. So, Dr. Edmar, thank you so much for coming out to the healthier tech podcast today.
Stephanie Warner 37:59
And thank you so much. Hi, guys.
Announcer 38:02
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the healthier tech podcast. Remember to check the show notes for all the links and resources mentioned in the show. Please like and subscribe to the healthier tech podcast on Apple, Spotify or your podcast platform of choice. Get your free quickstart guide to building a healthy relationship with technology and our latest information at healthier tech.co
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
