Ban the term productivity from medical care

According to Wikepedia: Productivity describes various measures of the efficiency of production. A productivity measure is expressed as the ratio of output to inputs used in a production process, i.e. output per unit of input. Productivity is a crucial factor in production performance of firms and nations. Please tell me how this relates to being a physician or a patient.  We do not produce anything.  Rather we work with individuals to diagnosis, prevent, treat, and hopefully improve both longevity and quality of life. Physicians work with individual patients.  We should strive to tailor care with our patient. Productivity implies that we can count patient units.  That idea really disrupts the essential Why question? If you are unfamiliar with Why I highly recommend Simon Sinek’s book Start with Why. Why did we become physicians?  I think the answer for most physicians includes helping individual patients.  We strive to do our best for each patient. Where did productivity enter our profession?  Most experts believe that Hsaio’s NEJM article – Estimating Physicians’ Work for a Resource-Based Relative-Value Scale led to RVUs (relative value units) which many practice administrators use to measure “productivity”.  Hsaio, a noted economist, wrote in the abstract of that article: We found that physicians can rate the relative amount of work of the services within their specialty directly, taking into account all the dimensions of work. ...
Source: DB's Medical Rants - Category: Internal Medicine Authors: Tags: Medical Rants Source Type: blogs