There is a lot that’s broken in healthcare. Costs are soaring, insurance is a fiasco, and many people don’t get the care they need.

Though healthcare is a rewarding career, it can be relentless. The hours can be challenging, but more than that, the responsibility and stress tend to weigh on on every single person involved in a patient's care. (So much so that more than 50% are experiencing healthcare provider burnout.)

So it’s understandable if you’re a healthcare provider that you might feel a sense of frustration and hopelessness about the work.

The reality is that despite all of that, you are a hero. No superhero in any movie does as much good as any aide or doctor or nurse in their career. Healthcare providers save lives and change lives hourly.

Yes, it’s something I already know — but two things happened in the last week that brought this reality into vivid relief for me.

On a personal level, last Friday my 8-month-old grandson was swept away by ambulance and admitted to the PICU after airway issues began to severely restrict his breathing. Perhaps healthcare is broken, but it wasn't for him. Dozens of people cared for him over 4 days — and each and every person did so flawlessly, compassionately, attentively, and brilliantly. The people who cared for him saved his life — and the way they cared for him got him and his family quickly on the road to health and calm. 

On a national level, that same weekend, a shooter killed 22 people and horrifically wounded 20 others. A New York Times story shows the incredible heroism, selflessness, ingenuity, and courage of the medical providers (from surgeons to housekeeping staff) who saved the lives of the wounded and kept the death toll from rising still higher. Of course, this was integrally linked with the professionalism, efficacy, and bravery of the first responders that day. 

People who provide medical care take on the stress, trauma, and everyday struggles of their patients. And they do so in service of their patients' lives — placing the patients' well-being above their own, in many cases. That's the definition of selfless courage in my book. 

Whether you do medical collaboration or not... whether you do telemedicine or not... whether you feel it on any given day... you are a hero. And while that can't make the job easier — it should let you feel pride for what you do. 

Find more inspiring stories about healthcare providers working together here:

We are passionate about thoughtful, effective medical care, especially new models that work in complex situations. That's why we are big supporters of WOCNs. It's why we love these Long Term Care programs. And it's why we started ClickCare.

As we all know, long term care and care for chronic conditions is only increasing as a percentage of the total medical field. So solutions that don't treat chronic problems as acute but rather treat them as the holistic, long-term conditions that they are -- have a lot of potential to be transformative.

A new example of this kind of out-of-the-box thinking caught our eye recently, for just these reasons. It's a model called Community Paramedics or "mobile integrated health care." The model is structured to avoid frequent trips to the emergency room by folks who could be better treated at home. So when an emergency call is made, and paramedics respond, the paramedics are trained to connect with physicians via tools like videoconferencing on an as-needed basis. That usually means additional training, a team approach, and an emphasis on preventing unnecessary transport.

The New York Times quotes Dr. Karen Abrashkin, one of the leads in a Community Paramedics program, as saying, “A lot of what’s been done in the E.R. can safely and effectively be done in the home... the hospital is not always the safest or best place to be.” So the Community Paramedics programs focus on treating patients with at-home visits by paramedics, avoiding E.R. visits.

The justification is pretty simple. Emergency rooms often lead to readmissions, increased length of stay, deconditioning, rehab and physical therapy to regain mobility, hospital-acquired infections, and delirium. These things are true with most populations, but especially true for patients with complex problems or those who can be treated/triaged instead of becoming super-utilizers of emergency rooms. 

For the patients, the consequences of this kind of emergency room visit can be deadly or contribute to a decreased quality of life. Of course, on "another side of the table", these issues also put hospitals -- especially in a pay for performance system -- under huge amounts of financial pressure.

Community Paramedics challenge the typical thinking of "we need to do this just to be safe." But "just to be safe" can kill. So we think this kind of thoughtful approach could be hugely impactful as a model. 

We would argue that videoconferencing in these situations is ultimately not the best way to go, since it necessitates physicians to be immediately available, makes the flow of treatment with the patient more challenging, and cannot be used later as a teaching case. We believe that especially when you are working with teams across the continuum of care, it's really important that consults can be done asynchronously using a healthcare collaboration tool like hybrid store-and-forward telemedicine.

It makes financial sense and it keeps people in their homes, healthy and mobile, longer.

Learn more about how healthcare collaboration tools can support innovative models like this one: