WELLNESS
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ellness and self-care are no longer fads. They are here to stay, and their influence will increasingly be seen in healthcare in 2024 and beyond. McKinsey and Company estimates that the wellness market is growing to $1.5 trillion. Even traditional structures like hospitals and clinics cannot avoid the burgeoning wellness trend. Brokers who foster this awareness with their clients can stay ahead of the curve in recommending effective wellness programs and benefits for employees. Before we get into examples, let’s first consider what wellness and self-care mean. Both wellness and self-care signify the importance of our own subjective experience and our ability to improve our lives, above and beyond an external interpretation of objective measurements. Wellness brings the subjective and objective together. Self-care can be understood in this context as well. If selfcare takes on a fixed, strict interpretation of self-as-individual or self-as-body, this can become problematic. We can become overly self-critical, taking us away from a more expansive experience of ourselves and our community. The kind of wellness and self-care that will sustain and continue to influence healthcare will be that of finding a middle ground.
Addressing burnout
A Year of Breakthrough Technology Disrupting Healthcare at Breakneck Speed By Dr. Anoop Kumar, MD
32 | CALIFORNIA BROKER
Health insurance professionals need to take care of themselves well too, as they guide their clients to provide the best healthcare benefits for their workers. So, having an awareness of your own role in self-care can help foster an understanding of how to present this to clients. Selling insurance can be highly stressful, especially during open enrollment. So, brokers know firsthand how ‘burnout’ can happen. Within healthcare, wellness for clinicians has also become a priority as their rates of burnout — now better known as “moral injury” — are devastating the workforce. There is a concerted effort to assist clinicians in many tasks using artificial intelligence (AI). AI is being used to help radiologists make accurate diagnoses more quickly, and to help sort through medical records and give a more accurate glimpse of the history of a patient, thereby giving clinicians a heads up about what to expect. These uses are purported to help clinicians reduce workload and stress, thereby enabling them to focus on patients more. In a world where so much of a clinician’s time is spent on documentation, this technology has an opportunity to improve clinician wellness when used in the right setting.
Changes in care settings
One of the big changes in healthcare that has been underway for several years already and is accelerating is the shift in the location of where care happens. Previously, it was the hospital or clinic. More recently, it has happened in quick-care centers and over video calls. Healthcare is increasingly happening where you are now, rather than in its own facility. We are seeing the development of AI-based
CalBrokerMag.com
JANUARY 2024
