America’s primary care doctors are burning out, cutting back their hours, and leaving their practices early, driven in part by the demands of handling the flood of digital messages from their patients.
But a trio of new University of Michigan studies offer hope for easing this crisis, and improving both the care that patients get and the work lives of those who provide it. The studies could help primary care clinics nationwide take steps to keep the bedrock of American health care from crumbling further.
All three papers, published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, stemmed from efforts to understand and address the concerns of primary care providers at Michigan Medicine, U-M’s academic medical center.
They each center around the issue of digital messages sent by patients through their…