In his latest video, ZDoggMD explores his decision to pursue a career in primary care medicine and, now, navigating a healthcare environment that is less focused on patients and their stories and more concerned with bureaucracy.
The video, "7 Years," is a parody of a song by the same name by Lukas Graham. In ZDoggMD's version, he sings about deciding to become a physician at 7 years old to follow in his father's footsteps. He sings that his father encouraged him to stay away from primary care and instead enter a subspecialty.
"I always had that dream, like my daddy before me, be a healer, take the time to know my patients' story," ZDoggMD sings. "That subspecialty glory, just always seemed to bore me. To make health primary, that passion always seemed to draw me."
ZDoggMD, whose real name is Zubin Damania, a Stanford hospitalist, continues to sing about a despotic system.
"Soon I was 30 years old, trapped in a system that sucked souls. Insurance, EHR, Press Ganey owned me. Soon I feel 80 years old," he sings.
ZDoggMD sings a message of a new healthcare, one where primary care is central to care plans, and the human relationship between patients and physicians is upheld. In a post accompanying the video, he writes about three stages of he industry. Health 1.0 is, as he writes, "a long-lost, nostalgia-tinged world of unfettered provider autonomy, sacred doctor-patient relationships, and a laser-like focus on the art and humanity of medicine." While physicians look at this as medicine's golden days, ZDoggMD writes that this era had its shortcomings, like high costs and low quality.
Health 2.0 was the era of big medicine, regulation, healthcare technology. ZDoggMD calls it the era of "Medicine as Machine" where physicians and patients are just cogs in the machinery.
The next step, Health 3.0, combines the best of Health 1.0 and Health 2.0 to create a human-centered, technology enabled industry. "What emerges is vastly greater than the sum of the parts," he writes.